


Gray Area

by Sacred_Trickster (The_Divine_Fool)



Category: DCU, Teen Titans - All Media Types, Young Justice - All Media Types
Genre: Action, Aerial Combat, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Art, Awkward Flirting, Blood and Violence, Borderline crack, Cockpits, Dialogue, Dialogue Heavy, Fluff, Humor, Illustrations, Injury, M/M, Plot What Plot, Pseudoscience, Spaceships, Wormholes, grampy driving
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2020-09-07 03:14:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 25,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20302519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Divine_Fool/pseuds/Sacred_Trickster
Summary: “I bet you spent a lot of time in spaces like that, growing up.” said Slade. “Cars, subs, aircraft. Stake-outs, rendezvous. No music, no talking, just you and him... and the radar, buzzing… the sound of his stubble in the darkness. Steady growing, growing.”Nightwing suppressed a shiver. “You have ahighly functioning, disturbed mind, Deathstroke.”Tch, the air faintly hissed through the vents in his mask. “Dick. I’m whelmed.”





	1. through the wormhole

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, you!  
...  
You're finally awake!  
...  
...  
Just kidding. This story is a subspace filament of the author's broken brainpiece. Updated intermittently.
> 
> pls enjoy~

“ -- And as the wormhole is closing this woman turns to me, I swear to the new gods -- she turns to me and says ‘Will we see each other again, Dick?’”

A partly disassembled pistol lay on the dash in front of his old enemy; a different dashboard, different ship, every week. If Dick learned one thing from his very brief long-distance video calls with Deathstroke over the years, it was the bastard was always, _always_ in a cockpit. And even if he was knocking your teeth out in person -- you could bet your freakin' birdarangs Deathstroke wasn’t _far_ from a cockpit.

“The more important question is, I think -- how your colleague managed to _re_direct a wormhole with a _proton_ cannon.” 

Even filtered through his mask and channeled over the airwaves, Slade’s voice was high-octane lethal and smoother than peanut butter; it was waiting around the corner for you, and it was gonna make your murder look sexy as hell.

“As usual, Slade, you’re missing the point.” 

Nightwing pushed around some files on his desk with his boot heel, almost considered reaching for one just for something else to run his eyes over -- and picked his dinner from the chaos instead. A bowl of noodles, chilled to Cave temperature the instant it left the microwave, probably. It was the kind with petrified veggies floating in the broth. The sad green specks made him feel marginally better about eating garbage. 

A leak in the roof of his brain informed Dick he wasn’t fooling anyone.

“Standing on the precipice of a statistical _mir_acle, asking stupid questions, like -- I don’t have time to explain _string_ theory, lady, just get in the hole!” He sent a chopstick flying. 

“Sometimes,” Deathstroke’s slow sarcasm settled over his afterglow like dark silk. “I wonder if all manner of heroics weren’t just substitute for a good, hard shove.”

When Barbara Gordon first accused him of ‘consorting with the enemy’ during his roughly once-weekly video chats with Slade Wilson, Nightwing told her it wasn’t like that. 

Of course then the former Batgirl had asked what _was_ it like -- and, well. 

Running into Slade in the field was like seeing someone he knew from the Aikido club of a rival high school for four years, or a tour in Vietnam. Or, Church. A whole handbasket of ingrown memories -- unquestionably a part of him, but best left in the dark.

The first time Dick interacted with the mercenary online was purely coincidental. He was on Alpha assignment; he’d accessed the Dark Web under deep cover from a VPN in Ralaysia to investigate evidence of a metahuman trafficking ring. Cloaked in the shadow of his own protective programming, Dick was utterly untraceable; yet somehow, Slade found him. He'd tracked the quiet corners in the forums, the muted users, the vapor trails of a nonentity in pirate’s bay, and drew him out of hiding with an anonymous tip. The mission wrapped up. Messy, but without a hitch. Nightwing still didn’t know why he did it.

Dick told himself he didn’t know why, anyway, but a part of him always knew: Slade liked to fuck with people’s minds. Always had, always would. 

Finally Barbara settled on referring to the calls as his weekly ‘serenades with Strokey’.

Slade’s eye shifted from the pistol gutted over his dash and settled on the monitor, unwavering. “I forgot my viola.”

“Ha-ha.” The former Boy Wonder chuckled weakly. If Deathstroke serenaded him on the viola he would probably bust a tube in his brain and go vegetative. “Left it in your other cockpit?”

“Just out of curiosity,” said the mercenary, at leisure, like he was toying with a ball of yarn. “How _do_ you explain these conversations -- this gray area -- to your simple, black-and-white hero friends? Is it enhanced interrogation technique? Lessons in mind games? ...Chats with an old friend?”

Dick barked a laugh. “_Chat_ting with the immense sadist from my past, yeah, right.” He shrugged. “I tell them the truth, more or less.”

“Which is?”

“We met up playing an online video game, one time.”

A static hiss from the mask vents indicated Deathstroke’s amusement. He sat back in his chair. “Only a mind perverted by death, torture, and ultra-violence at a young age would refer to the Uberwald trials as a _video game_.”

“Why not? We entered online. With, albeit dubious consent. But there were rules, objectives, and avatars -- ”

“We were trapped in virtual reality for 163 days.”

“But with the hyperbolic time warp, only a few minutes.”

“A few minutes and a few _hun_dred death matches with the galaxy’s most demented killers. The original idea was only _one_ warrior makes it out alive, remember? Winner kills all?”

Nightwing leaned back and clasped his hands behind his neck. He smiled distantly. Even the memory was a rush. “The probability of the Uberwald trials showing up in _this_ part of the Multiverse during _my_ lifetime was the same as opening the dryer and finding all my laundry folded inside. No way was I gonna miss out on the off-chance I wouldn’t win.”

“You _are_ demented.”

“No, I’m nineteen,” said Dick. He made a dive for the lost chopstick. “I’m invincible. Took out the Arbitrator, didn’t I? And that board of fishy administrators. Mission complete; that was the last round of Uberwald, ever.”

The mercenary’s eye rolled. “Except, the stadium travels via nonlinear random entanglement, so it could appear whenever and wherever, in whatever dimension it pleases. It could have already appeared, one-hundred years from now, future or past. When you think about it -- have you really done anything at all?”

“Don’t take this victory from me.”

“Victory?” For an instant Slade’s eye widened and his voice cut and growled. “They cut your throat!”

Nightwing laughed, resisted the urge to bring a hand to the front of his neck. There was no evidence of physical scarring from the virtual attack, but he wasn’t going to sit around and pretend the psychological damage of having his throat slit hadn’t been legendary. “Alright, chill out, I remember. Don’t get jealous or anything.”

The eye narrowed to vicious proportions. “Oh, I’m _wild_ with it.” 

Deathstroke started tinkering again with the pistol and Dick let the silence ride while he finished his noodles and the mercenary’s mood sizzled back down. Then he thought, riling Slade was so much fun.

“What’s the matter? How long does it take to polish a six-inch sidearm, anyway?”

Slade didn’t regularly field stupid questions, and Dick knew that, so he was already at the control panel on his monitor and zooming in on the feed of the cockpit. On the dash was what looked to him like an ordinary semi-automatic: six rounds, probably 9-millimeter. There was something familiar about the red glow -- 

“You’re dissecting Apokolips tech?”

“Grabbed this off Ugly,” Slade murmured to the parts in his gloved fingers. “It’s an ordinary glock, but -- they’ve modded it for an Apokolips fuel cell. Supposedly, the cells draw their power from the fire pits of an interdimensional -- “

Slade paused. His pale eye slid up to the lens on the monitor. “But you already knew this.”

Dick felt a smile twitch at the corner of his mouth. “They’re powered by something called ambient forces. Not originated from the Apokolips fire pits, but it’s a similar energy. I would send you my notes on the Omega Effect if I didn’t think you’d use the knowledge for nefarious purposes.”

Deathstroke dropped the modified cell he was examining and leaned back in the pilot’s chair. He propped his elbow over the arm and cocked one knee. “More nefarious than Intergang leaking alien firearms disguised as common glocks into the underground? I watched a misfire from this little _six_-shooter disintegrate a city bus. The next petty crime spree will erase an entire suburb.”

“It’s already on my radar. But thanks for the heads up.” Nightwing crossed his arms. “What’s got you bumping elbows with Intergang anyway?”

“Oh, this and that.”

Behind his mask, Dick rolled his eyes. “I like this game, Slade. You misdirect me, I misdirect you -- I walk into a conversation, you walk out of it.”

“I like it too, Dick.”

Secret identities were so retro but when Deathstroke said his name it still alarmed Nightwing; it left him feeling stripped down and vulnerable, in some way. 

He swallowed, dodged, and parried. “Seriously, should I send a team to call on your usual clients? The Brotherhood’s been quiet lately. I’ll still _act_ surprised, when we uncover whatever it is you’re plotting.”

“Don’t do a lot of plotting these days.” Slade spread his hands in mock despair. “This _meta_gene business, and all these new heroes -- private security’s hot right now; everyone wants a bodyguard. Even the big-time crime lords won’t pawn a stolen bike without ten ex-jugheads standing around adjusting sac.”

“Thanks for the image. So, business is booming.” Nightwing gathered. “You should be thanking the Justice League for your paycheck.”

“Or, _you_, I suppose,” the mercenary purred. “And your covert track and retrieve operation. And yet the _Night_wing isn’t even J-L material, apparently. What happened -- didn’t like the knock-off costume? The League is only for capes? Is this the glass ceiling, Dick?”

“Nah,” he flipped a hand. “I didn’t want it.”

“You used to want it.”

He and _Wally_ used to want it, Dick thought. “And you used to have a long glorious ponytail, dog -- what’s your point?”

“_Hm_,” Deathstroke hummed, and held the note for obscene conversational length. Then: “No point.” 

Nightwing was transported through a stock of vividly wrought, unpleasantly visceral prepubescent nightmares -- things that drove him nearly to psychotic break in his early years after going solo. Slade. One eye watching from the shadows; Slade, one step ahead of him -- Slade holding him down. 

Dick went to rub his eyes and found mask instead. It felt like the SuperCycle was ripping donuts inside his head. 

Slade leaned. Propped the steel toe of one boot on the dash. Big animal in a small cockpit. 

“What’s a _Bat_ doing relying on Super-gear for, anyway? Robin had his own bike. Isn’t it time for the leader of the League’s shadow organization to acquire something personal, dark and flashy?”

Dick thought distantly of his mug of herbal tea. Forgotten by the microwave, probably. “I, uh -- guess I never thought about it.”

“Never thought about it,” the mercenary echoed idly. “The Bat always travels in style. Air, land, sea, space -- he’s got the little deuce coupe equivalent for every element.”

“And you’re stuck in rentals. Life sucks.”

Slade hummed again.

“I bet you spent a lot of time in spaces like that, growing up.” He said. “Cars, subs, aircraft. Stake-outs, rendezvous. No music, no talking, just you and him... and the radar, buzzing… the sound of his stubble in the darkness. Steady growing, growing.”

Nightwing suppressed a shiver. “You have a _high_ly functioning, disturbed mind, Deathstroke.”

_Tch_, the air faintly hissed through the vents in his mask. “Dick. I’m whelmed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeaa its gonna be one of those smoosh all the timelines together sort of deals  
a lil bit of t and t, some post season 2 y-j. 
> 
> have a doodle too
> 
>   
  



	2. midnight noodles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> more?  
these chapters are so short i'm putting one song on each.

It was difficult to determine the exact nature of the blue light reflecting around Slade’s cockpit; he might’ve been underwater or high in the atmosphere -- or parked somewhere on the other side of the world under heavy fluorescents. Nightwing glanced at his secondary monitor. In the last ten minutes, the mercenary’s position had jumped from Aruba to Washington, DC. Soon Dick’s own anti-tracking protocol would kick in and his location would bounce as well. 

“Didn’t see you last week,” he said. “And no offense, dude, but even your _mask_ looks tired. Long one?”

The mercenary’s eye rose and fell and he spoke in a parody of exasperation. “Wretchedly. Job way out in the desert, some Tuari chieftain trading in white camels. I had to stand around in full gear while they drilled for water and mined fossilized animal fats. The air smelled like diesel and burning shit; the client didn’t even show half the time; and your girlfriend’s twisted dictum must be catching on because the other half of the security detail called me _Strokey_.”

Nightwing chuckled into his midnight noodles. “How the mighty fall.”

“Whatever.” Slade let his heel fall from the dash to the floor with a heavy metal _thunk_ and swiftly cocked the other in its place. “I’m playing the long game, kiddo. Everyone will get what’s coming for them -- I just have to decide when to hit the switch.”

“Is that what you told yourself when Miss Martian cleaned your clock on the Scarab job?”

_Thunk._ The mercenary’s heel fell to the floor. His pale gray eye locked on the monitor. Then, slowly: “She didn’t clean my _any_thing, shit-whistle. I didn’t like the odds and decided to call in my chips on the Light -- ”

“Oh-ho,” Nightwing interrupted cheerfully. “Call in your chips, knock yourself out, and hide in a closet. Was that part of your plan?”

“She brain-blasted me from behind!” He snarled. “My mind is a temple but it wasn’t built to withstand a blow from Martian _C4._”

Dick hummed, sympathetic. “Few are. I haven’t seen you this salty since Trigon called you his _minion_. Relax, dude. Everyone in this conversation has taken Ls before.”

“I thought you had some kind of honor code, anyway.” he said, unsated. “I’m lucky I walked out of there with my psyche intact. And my shit on straight.”

Nightwing found the brain-blasting technique mildly unsettling himself, but he didn’t share his unease with the mercenary. “Oh, and _you’ve_ got an honor code, have you? Hiding doomsday devices in hapless cities, freeing mutant criminals to achieve your petty ends, kicking the crap out of _chil_dren -- ”

“First of all, we both know those devices were just -- ”

“Mind games.”

“And the mutants were only -- ”

“Minions.”

“And beating on children, come on. I -- ”

“You did _not_ pull your punches.”

“Of course not! Only a moron underestimates a bunch of idealistic super teens.”

“Tell that to the Light.”

“They had to learn on their own,” Slade waved one hand dismissively. “The difference was I thought of you as equals -- not fighting at full strength wouldn’t do either of us any good, master or apprentice; it might not be an honor code, but it’s a code.”

Dick shook his head. Then, slowly: “For the last time, you murderous meta-douche, I was not, never have been, and never will be your apprentice. Every breath you take on this version of Planet Earth is a blow to the struggle for peace and justice in the universe.”

Slade leaned. His eye narrowed. He was amused. “All I’m saying is, if you’re gonna _brain_-blast somebody and leave them drooling in a closet for six hours, have the decency to look him in the eye first. The good eye.”

“Look, it might not've been your idea of a fight, but you _did_ walk out of it. And your shit’s on straight,” Nightwing pointed out. “Which is more than I can say, probably, for the poor guy calling you Strokey.”

Slade crossed his arms and pretended to examine a secondary monitor. “I didn’t do _dick_ about it. The client brought her in personally. And I like my nuts firmly attached.”

“Oh?” This stirred his interest. “Someone who can bully Deathstroke? Who is she?”

Slade didn’t respond, but he didn’t end the call either, only looked on while the young detective continued to pry. 

“The League has tabs on most high-profile villains outside of super-max right now, with the exception of a few... Of those, even fewer are female, and even _few_er could kill your mood. Let’s see… not Queen Bee, it’s not her type of work. Madam Rouge?”

Slade snorted. 

“No? Way out in the desert, hmm. Oh, shit -- Lady Shiva? Are you teamed up with the most dangerous woman alive?”

“_Team_ isn’t really the right word for it.”

“Oh, Slade. Are you her bitch?”

“_No_,” he growled. “This isn’t the first time I’ve worked with Shiva, and it won’t be the last. I could probably take her, but the fight would wreck the whole scene and I want to get paid.”

“_Strokey_.”

Slade fell back in his chair with a clipped sigh. “Now I know how you felt sidekicking with Batman all those years. I guess I should be thankful mine’s not a sentence served in tights.”

“No need to resort to personal attacks.”

“If you didn’t want personal attacks, _why_ did you call me.” He demanded, like he’d been gnawing on the question and it finally slipped free after six months of bickering.

“I -- ”

“What happened?” Slade ranged in again. “Dear old dad not checking his texts? Or is communication with the Bat all back-alleys and 50s slant lighting?”

Dick shrugged. He wasn’t far off. “Don’t pretend that isn’t your style, too.”

Slade’s eye widened; he extracted a cellphone from the pocket above his knee, looked left and right and spread his hands as if to showcase the extent of his character development in plain view and full frontal lighting. Dick snorted.

“Right, the image of you _bask_ing in a different _cock_pit every week is _so_ much more forthcoming than the old clocks and warehouses you used to haunt.”

“Well, now I feel attacked.”

Dick barked a laugh before he could help it.

The mercenary put his phone away and slowly folded his hands over his belt. His boot toed the lever of the ship’s external dampener. 

“Where are you?” Dick wondered.

Slade shifted his shoulders. “Closer than you think.”

Nightwing frowned at the challenge, flicked his eyes over his wall of screens, buzzing dispatch radios set to local frequencies, radars fine-tuned to activity abroad. In the end, he knew there was no finding Deathstroke until the big tit wanted to be found.

“Drives you mad, doesn’t it?” said Slade. “It drove you mad as Robin. It drives you mad now. Flattering, really, if I didn’t wonder about the daddy issues coming into play.”

“You’re obsessed with it, dude. My daddy issues make you feel right at home.”

“_Ugh_,” the mask vents aired an exasperated hiss. “Twisted little punk.”

“You know, I’ve been thinking about it, and you were right,” Nightwing paused and sipped noisily at his tea. “We are a lot alike.”

“A-ha. What changed your mind? Scrapping the cape?”

“No, I -- get over the cape, will you? -- I just… get the impression that, you lost everything, at some point. That’s all.”

Deathstroke leaned over his elbow, pretended to examine his nails through his glove.

“Look, man.” Dick went on. "I know you think I’m wasted potential -- a knock-off, stock-copy of the OG Bat -- ”

Slade snorted. “No I don’t.”

“What?”

“_No_, you’re not.” He clarified. “You were a travelling acrobat by age _two_ \-- had a lifetime’s serving of terror, trauma, death -- and then the Batman held your head underwater with this vigilante business from _nine_, and I’m not stupid enough to think it was all his idea. He might be the OG Bat but _you’re_ the OG Robin. Why do you think I took such an interest in you, in those early days?”

“Err -- to fuck with my head?”

“You’re something different.”

“I, uh -- ” Dick stuttered. “Haven’t felt this blind-sided since the True Master turned out to be a little old lady.”

The mercenary linked his hands behind his neck and scoffed. “The True Master has been missing for years, there’s no way you -- ”

“Met her back when I was thirteen." Nightwing crossed his arms. "Yeah, a villain dared me to do it, so I, uh, took some time off the team, climbed a mountain, and did the training.”

“Sure. You completed the trials and trained with the True Master when you were thirteen. Why am I not surprised.”

“Hey, Batman didn’t teach me _every_thing I know. And -- honestly, dude, there was a period in my life when I spent more time sparring over rooftops with _you_ than anyone else -- ”

“So you’re only _part_ bat,” he hummed. “Is that why you scrapped the cape?”

Dick sighed. “Deathstroke…”

“I like it. Titanium microfiber might improve your stats in stealth and self-defense -- but let’s face it, the cape throws a distracting veil over one of your greatest... assets.”

Nightwing lifted a hand to his brow and applied pressure to his temples. He didn’t need to hide his embarrassment because he didn’t _have_ any; there was absolutely _no_ blushing in the Bat Cave. None of that. Especially not under the gaze of the man who had been kicking his ass, intimately, for six years off-and-on.

The former Boy Wonder frowned and narrowed his eyes on the video feed. “I can see your sole.”

_Thunk_. Deathstroke’s heel dropped, the sound of his wicked laughter filled the cockpit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unrelated y-j art:
> 
>   



	3. life in the cockpit (downers)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yo~  
some mildly NSFW sladin art at the bottom of this chapter --  
never thought i'd use the phrase 'clothed boner' but  
here we are  
y'all been warned

  


“Oh!”

“What?”

“I just remembered where I left my tea.”

The weak sock smell of sencha saturated the stale air. A cricket had made its way into a dark corner of the Cave. As Nightwing resettled, he had a vision of himself growing old in his chair. Not that chair specifically but _a_ chair, anyway -- deep underground, in some secret hole somewhere -- and in his vision he was so old and gnarly he was growing _shrooms_ on it. 

A passing flock of lights splashed into the ship and Dick admired a crease of gold as it spilled down Deathstroke's armored shin. 

The mercenary was splayed spider-like in a shabby cockpit, as usual -- always with the peculiar grace of a military man turned outlaw. He was sewing up an angry gash on his forearm under the glow of a flickering gas-lamp, swearing intermittently. His ship looked hot, poorly-lit, and over-greased. The chassis rattled and faintly squealed every time Slade adjusted course. Outside a badly smeared windshield rolled an endless scroll of vague blue silhouettes. Mountains or cityscape, he couldn’t say. 

A bit of movement out-of-place drew his eye, and behind the pilot Dick observed a man in an indigo headcloth slipping between the shadows, edging into the cockpit. From under his robes the man drew a long knife. Nightwing narrowed his eyes on the assassin without looking up from his tea. It was a petal-tipped machete, great for hacking through stiff vegetation or, in a pinch, the human spinal cord. 

Finally, his familiarity with the mercenary won a close match against his empathy for the guy trying to stab him, and Dick cleared his throat. 

“Is that your, uh, hood fan, running, dude? It sounds like a wood chipper.”

Slade dropped his needle and leaned over the elbow of his injured arm to slap a couple of switches on the dash. The hood fans stuttered to a halt and quiet fell. He sat back in a huff. “I hate this rig.”

“Trade-in?” Dick offered, kindly.

Slade picked up his needle again. “Worst deal I ever made. I’ve driven _shop_ping carts with greater hull integrity. And my connect forgot to mention the _land_ing gears were all jammed, which means I have to cut the engines during full-burn and pray I’ve found a bowl of soup big enough to drop this thing in.”

“Gosh, life in the cockpit is so exciting.”

The assassin stayed glued to the shadows. 

Slade tied four excruciating knots on top of his last stitch before snipping the tail on the black surgical thread. A few blobs of dark crimson leaked from the wound. Behind the pilot, the man with the machete was drawing his arm back for the swing. It left his chest wide open, but it had to be a pretty good swing to hack through Deathstroke’s armor _and_ send his head rolling. 

Ripples shook the surface of his tea. 

The next few tenths of a second imprinted themselves in Nightwing's memory and made the short scene last an eternity. He saw the machete, carving downward. Deathstroke, pivoting as he rose from his chair. The elbow of his freshly sewn arm slammed the blade at the hilt, knocking it from the would-be assassin’s hand, and then Slade jammed the sewing scissors through the front of his throat. 

The indigo headscarf turned black in moments -- a long, arching spray of ruby-red blood ejected from the puncture around the scissor blades. Dick was struck by the strange, operatic beauty of villainy.

When he stopped gurgling, Slade squeezed his glove around his victim's neck and cast the body aside; it fell clumsily behind the pilot’s chair. The mercenary stooped, retrieved the cast-aside machete, edged around the corpse and fell back into his seat. He played with the blade for a minute, redirecting light over his dash. Dick eyed the slice on his arm. 

“Another day in the cockpit, huh.”

“Iridium blade,” said Slade, absorbed in his boyish light tricks. “Pretty sweet.”

“I’ve never seen one of the Tuari outside the desert.”

“Yeah, well.” He lowered the blade. “Next time, I’ll let you get his number first.”

“Didn’t you just work a job for them? That, uh, security detail?”

“Sure, helped them drive the whole herd across the sands and into the city, as promised. Once my contract was up -- ”

“Let me guess,” Dick interrupted. “You coaxed them onto a ship bound for your richest buyer, and cashed out on both jobs. You only took the security gig to guide your investment across the desert; the _real_ job was double-crossing the natives and selling a sacred animal on the black market."

"It sounds shitty when you take out all the details like that. What about the part with me, suffering in the desert for 90 days? And that bitch called me Strokey." 

"No wonder the Tuari want your head -- you smuggled the creatures you _swore_ to guard out of a protected zone -- ”

Deathstroke shrugged. “Sorry, kiddo. Buyer offered me a sum I couldn’t refuse -- it made the bounty on the security gig look like painted rocks. What’s sacred to some, you know, it always turns out to be delicacy to others; you make a thing off-limits, and people only desire it more. Like carbohydrates. And gay sex.”

“Then go sell buns, dude! Leave the Tuari out of it.”

“I won’t be selling my buns, Dick. I’m good at what I do.”

“Really?”

“What?”

“I mean, don’t you get sick of it? Life racing cockpit to cockpit, everybody swinging for both sides, knives coming at your back, and no offense but that ship looks like it smells.”

“It does.” Slade said firmly, a frown in his voice. “What’s your point?”

“Where’s the glamor? I mean, when does it end? Where does all the money go, from these jobs?”

“Oh, well, since you ask. I funnel all my disposable income into kitten rescues.”

Nightwing kicked back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his neck. He knew he wouldn’t get anywhere with his old nemesis using the usual tactics. So he started guessing. “Nah. You look like the kind of guy with expensive toys. You've got a house, probably, somewhere quiet. Someplace the neighbors can’t look at you.”

Slade shifted his shoulders. “This is sounding rapey.”

Dick rolled his eyes. “Take the fucking mask off.”

“What?”

“The _mask_. Come on, it looks hot as hell in there, anyway. Just take it off. I’ve seen you before.” Dick started to get frantic. He gestured at his wall of screens. “I could pull up one of your old military profiles right now.”

“No, you couldn’t. Special Forces doesn’t build profiles of their operatives like that. For _obvious_ reasons.” He snorted softly. “So try again.”

“_Slade._”

“A-ha. Okay, say my name like that three times, and I’ll consider it.”

Nightwing scowled. “Ass.”

“Cock!” His eye settled on the monitor. “What game are we playing?”

“Did your wife take your _marbles_ in the divorce?”

“Ask me what she took when she died.”

Dick blanched. “Slade, look... about that. We didn’t mean for it to go down that way at the Hive. I mean, I’m sor -- ”

The mercenary slapped a switch on his control panel. The feed cut out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the first fic i've ever wrote without mention of illicit drug use.  
then again --  
who knows what the dark side's really cooking with all that kobra venom ;0  
have some saucy art  

> 
>   
  



	4. pizza channel

“I’ve been blasting the airwaves for six weeks, man, what happened?” Nightwing slid into his chair. “Did you leave Earth’s magnetic field?” 

“It’s not a good time.”

“Huh?” He glanced up from his tea. “Why not? You’re all settled in your cockpit, wha -- what happened to your arm?”

“...Your _other_ arm, jack-ass.”

Dick burnt his tongue and put down his mug, hissing a breath between his teeth. Everything looked normal until Slade’s left arm stopped at the elbow. 

“The fuck did you do!”

“I miscalculated.”

“No shit! What happened to it!”

“Inertia.”

“Dog!” He exclaimed. “Is it… fresh?” The stump was tied off with a sleeve. He made a wild guess the mercenary hadn’t changed his armor since the injury. “You need a good no-questions medic? I have contacts in -- ”

“No.”

Slade’s boot knocked into the auto-pilot toggle on his dashboard as he lowered it to the floor. An overhead red light switched off and for a few minutes he navigated the ship manually. The feed on Nightwing's monitor shuddered over some kind of turbulence. He was losing altitude, or gaining.

Eventually the pilot spun the wheel with his remaining hand and docked it under the dashboard. The red light flashed back on. 

“At least you still have righty.”

“I’m left-handed.”

Dick fought a grimace. “Is it gonna heal like that?”

“Like what?”

“Um, wrapped up like a chimichanga dripping hot sauce?”

Deathstroke shrugged. “Metahuman super-soldier, remember? Heal factor 10.”

“...Is it gonna grow back?”

“I’m a mercenary, Dick. Not a cactus.”

Nightwing sipped his tea.

“But,” Slade’s eye addressed the stump. “I’ve never lost a limb before. I don’t know.”

“Oh, man, if you do grow it back, it’ll be disgusting,” Dick chuckled a little ruthlessly. “Please hit me up in the embryonic baby-hand phases -- I’ve never seen an arm regenerate before. It’ll probably hurt!”

Slade said nothing, and after a moment, Dick took marginally less delight in his old enemy’s pain. He fought off the giggles, but then the vision rose unbidden of Deathstroke, in a shabby cockpit, a pair of sewing scissors in his tiny regenerating hand.

Nightwing bit his lip. Sometimes the only justice he saw all week was Slade disgruntled. “Even if it doesn’t grow back, you’ve seen those neat new prosthetics Lex Corp is putting out. You can fit it up with all the black market upgrades: laptop guns, FarSight targeting system, deployable sentry packs -- think about it, man. _Cyber_-Slade -- Deathstroke’s whole new look.”

His dismal gray eye never lifted and Dick ranged onward. “Or you can do that dual wield short-swords thing again, back when they were attached to your gauntlets? I loved that phase.”

His shoulders shook under a snort. 

“I mean, I loved that technique,” Nightwing attempted to backtrack. “With the hand-swords. So fluid, you know? Super low center of gravity, that slippery horse-stance -- it’s elegant.”

“I liked the short-swords, too.”

Batman’s eldest protege leaned over one elbow and felt his mouth tilt in a smile. “You looked pretty good with a flaming glaive, too, as I recall.”

“That was a one time thing," said the mercenary. "And for the record, I wasn’t trying to help you; it was a courtesy shot at a common enemy for personal vengeance reasons only.”

“That’s cute, Slade. I’ll remember that when I’m putting together my scrapbook of our tightest moments.”

“Pound it up your ass, Dick.”

“Starting with _this_ one.” Nightwing shook his head but his smile widened. “Shit. This is better than when I accidentally bought you a drink at that bar in Bali -- you’re _mad_.”

“You’re still calling that an _ac_cident? You blew my cover. It almost cost me that whole job -- ”

“I didn’t know it was you, I swear. I was bored and waiting for a contact to show -- “

“Bull-_shit_.”

“I swear,” Dick giggled. “Did a quick sweep of the place, thought maybe tall dark and brooding in the corner could use a pick-me-up -- I was going through an eyepatch phase. And rope bondage. I thought you looked good at tying knots.”

Deathstroke straightened up in his chair. “Kid, are you just making this up on the spot?”

“I wasn’t wrong, was I?”

“I guess not,” he said, settling. His eye slid up to the monitor. “I’m terrific at knots. But was the _Apple_tini really necessary?”

Nightwing laughed. He pushed around some junk on the surface of his desk, put down his tea, then slapped his knee and laughed with reckless abandon. 

“I knew it. You knew it was me. You sent that gay drink to compromise me.”

Dick recovered. He fired a rubber band at the screen. “You still mad?”

“Impressed, I guess.”

He snorted. “Come on, man. It wasn’t that hard. The mask is pretty redundant when your whole aura screams ‘I’m Slade and I can snap all your bones in alphabetical order.’ And, the next time you’re aiming for stealth, why don’t you try strapping up with one or two knives instead of the usual seventy-three.”

“I was tailing a target -- didn’t need stealth, just a little subtlety.” Deathstroke cocked his knee. His eye narrowed. “And you robbed me of that.”

“You started a _hostage_ event at a five-star hotel in the middle of Monkey Forest -- the least expensive guest in attendance was the dude who invented the Segway, and he got dropped off in a _hel_icopter. You call that subtle?”

“You’re talking about my plan B,” said Slade. “Plan A was much more subtle and _did_n’t involve hijacking a helicopter, but some candy-ass _skirt_ ruined it for me with a provocative cocktail.”

Dick laughed, choked on a backdraft of tea, and coughed into his elbow. Tears in his eyes, he asked: “Are you calling me a skirt?”

“Didn’t you look stunning that night, by the way,” Slade said, flat and toneless like a threat.

“Um, that wasn’t a skirt, bro. That was a _sarong,_” said Nightwing. “Bali is famous for them. They’re great in the hot weather. Shirts optional.”

“Orange suits you.”

Dick flipped a hand. “Co_incidence_, Deathstroke.”

“Sure. Like it was a _coincidence_ that you show up, at the same bar as my target -- in a hotel near a very specific research facility in the heart of the damn Monkey Forest, just to fuck up my job in a skirt.”

"First of all, there's nothing wrong with a man in a sarong. And okay, fine -- I knew it was you and I sent over the drink because I wanted to say hello and thought steel against your throat was getting a little old. But I wasn’t there on a job, dude. The job just sort of, found me.”

“What were you doing in Bali in the first place?”

“You know, uh, this and that.”

Deathstroke sighed audibly. “What are you trying to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what are you calling for? If you want to argue, I’m not really in the mood. Freshly amputated, in case you forgot.” He brandished his drippy chimichanga. 

“No, I know, I -- ” Dick sat up, uncrossed his leg. “Sorry man. I was trying to take your mind off it. Look, do you need someplace to go? Because I’ve got boltholes across the eastern seaboard -- ”

“I don’t need your help.”

“Okay,” Nightwing lifted his hands. “I’ll back off. Just listen, okay? Listen to me for one second. I’ve seen you take huge, massive beatings. I mean, really, impressive beat-downs -- ” 

Slade rolled his remaining wrist in a _get on with it_ gesture. 

“I’ve never lost respect for you over it, though.”

A long exhale gushed through the vents in his mask, and Slade leaned out over the dash to flick a switch on his console. “I’m aft of you, 28 degrees.”

Suddenly Dick’s tracking system locked on the mercenary’s signal. He turned to one of his secondary screens and raised his eyebrows. “How did you bypass my security… ”

“Cloaking.”

“My proximity sensors should have ID’d your ship on the way in. They would notify me if there was any unauthorized -- ”

“How about,” Slade’s eye waxed full like his patience was thinning. “I _show_ you how I did it.”

Dick’s fingers froze over the keypad. “I... can’t leave holes in Cave security.”

The eye rolled. "There _aren't_ any. Not any more than usual."

"Then how did you -- " Suddenly it all made sense. Dick narrowed his eyes. "You snuck in through the pizza delivery channel, didn't you. Your ship is juggling multiple ID codes."

"I've been tracking secret bases and super teens long enough to know how you think." Deathstroke chuckled darkly. "Every bunker I've ever busted has had a fucking open route for food delivery."

In the back of his brain Nightwing planned an overhaul of Cave security, and a serious chat with his young comrades -- and he glared at the proud mercenary. "That's not very sporting of you."

"I think I'm bleeding out."

Dick jumped to his feet. He jabbed one finger at his monitor. "I'm not coming up there to nurse you!"

He left his chair, then trotted back to the open channel. “Will I need thrusters or just impulse power, you think?”

Slade leaned. Dick pretended his other hand was simply invisible. “Impulse should do it.”

“Cool, I have this new gear I’ve been meaning to try.” He left again, then trotted back to end the call. “And in terms of self-defense, Kevlar or polyethylene?” 

“Meaning?”

“Are you going to try and stab me, or shoot me.”

_Tch_. He shifted his shoulders. Everything in the known universe was falling slowly toward Slade's eye. "Try not to spoil the ending, hm?"


	5. intermission (blind spot)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aand we're back~  
this chapter featuring gay disaster Slade
> 
> enjoy ^^

Slade tracked the light of the failing day in the soft mirror of Dick’s cheek. 

Night trampled down, a gruesome, bruisy purple. The hatch was open; cargo bay lighting arced over his face in knife-cuts of amber and gold as Dick climbed up through the dressings of dusk. The Dark Knight had claimed twilight as his cloak, the darkness as his cape and cowl, but Nightwing inhabited the grayscale hours between night and day -- out of the quiet dawn, a bird of prey on silent wings. 

“This ship is dope!”

Flushed -- exhilaration from the short flight up, he guessed. Slade had brought his newest vessel in to hover ten or fifteen meters above a deep crag in a natural rock formation -- at the time not certain it was an entry point to the Bat's lair, but it was where _he_ would’ve hidden one, anyway. 

“Nice suit.”

“Wait till you see it from the back.” He challenged. Then -- not two feet away from the mercenary who regularly killed and maimed for money, glory, and personal satisfaction -- Dick turned his back on him. 

Deathstroke’s eye fell like it was invited. 

“Oops,” murmured Nightwing. “That came out exactly how I wanted.”

Slade grit his teeth and scowled over the riot of temptation under his ribs, admired the device between the young hero’s shoulder blades, then led his eye downward -- because he _was_ invited, damn it. 

Deathstroke was about as picky about who he killed and who he fucked as a dog was about fire hydrants; it only had to fit a pretty hardscrabble description before he was cocking a leg. A gun. Whatever. 

Then along came Dick.

“This is _Dragonfly_ tech.” Slade realized dimly. “One of Luther’s pet projects -- I didn’t think they were out of R&D.”

“They aren’t.” He didn’t turn back around, but he shifted foot to foot. “I mean, the blueprints were easy enough to get a hold of, and easy enough to build. Original specs were decent but I made a few adjustments -- ”

“A _few_,” Slade echoed, idly sliding his hand around the dorsal impulse generator. He selected one long titanium slat and extended the false wing. 

“Short-distance, you know,” he was rambling. “Good for a big jump and a long glide, but not straight flight or combat. Not yet, anyway -- work in progress. Where did you get this _craft_, dude? Last time I checked in you were driving that grimy old milk carton.”

“Black Manta owed me a favor -- turns out, not all of his toys are strictly submarine.” 

“It’s beautiful.” He said, ingenuous. “The silhouette is so sick; it’s like the breastbone of a bird. The concavity in the basal plate, that long keel -- and were those pneumatic holes I saw in the wings?”

Slade hummed an affirmation.

“_Dude_.” He praised. “That’s the kind of wing load you want -- this thing could probably break the _sound_ barrier with the right juice.”

“And it doesn’t smell like sweaty nuts.”

Dick giggled.

He wasn’t going to turn, so Slade turned him. And if he left his glove on his side longer than was necessary, it was only to test the caliber of Nightwing’s body armor: light, but not defenseless. Made sense: Robin’s only defensive gear had been the cape -- but gods forbid you let your guard slack within striking distance of wonder boy’s fuck-you-up steel toes. It shouldn’t be possible to build that much momentum in a body so small; but with nothing but a reinforced boot and an acrobat’s knowledge of centrifugal force, Robin could knock _Cinder_block senseless.

Deathstroke stepped closer, just to limit the range and slay-potential of the vigilante’s killer roundhouse; he was older now but no less leggy and a measure more powerful -- and Slade had taken one too many Ls in the past couple months to risk it. 

Deliberately slow so as not to provoke defensive action, he lifted his glove to his face and tested the seam of Nightwing's mask with his thumb. “I’ll take you for a ride, if you want.”

For a split second his blanked eyes widened.

“Oops,” Slade murmured. “That came out exactly how I wanted.”

Dick sobered quickly. His mouth quirked up under his hand, and Slade endured the eye-blacking dizziness of affection. 

“Sure. First -- a trade,” Nightwing knocked his hand aside. “Yours for mine.”

Slade adjusted his focus and exhaled long. Curious fingers played over his mask vents. His vision filled up with the little Bat.

“You still remember how to -- ?”

Fingers dipped under his jaw, found the clasps and snaps and manipulated them to release with a muffled _click! Hsst._

Slade rolled his eye and pushed his cowl aside as Nightwing took his mask in hand. “That would be a yes.”

“I’m tripping.” His lips curled further.

“Huh?”

“I’m bugging.” His hands fell.

“Huh?”

“Sorry. It’s been a while, and you're, so -- what _are_ you?”

Slade raised his eyebrows. “Seriously?”

Dick grinned sheepishly, and apologized again with the same insincerity. “It’s just, you’re… ”

“Brown.” said Slade. “I’m brown. You can say it.”

Dick tipped forward on his toes, then back. “Can you be more specific?”

Slade sighed. Because this fucking Mensa-certified kid-vigilante already knew more about him than anyone in his line of work ought to know, and more than anyone living or dead had a right to. He started to cross his arms, winced, and abandoned the effort. “_You’re_ the detective.”

Nightwing clipped Slade’s mask to his belt and arranged his hands on his hips. He nodded thoughtfully. “You’re, Australian.”

“Mm.”

“Some New Zealander.”

“Mhm.”

“A lefty.”

He snorted.

“And… ?”

After a moment, Dick fluttered up against him again. Hands on his neck. Figures the kid would have chronic cold-palm. 

“C’mon, Deathstroke. Who cares? You won’t show yourself on video feed -- which I _get_ \-- you’d sooner deliver a baby _Zoltan_ than a straight answer, and you’re so hard to track down it makes Batman look like a _1-800_ number. Can you just give me this, please? It won’t leave the cockpit, I swear.” Lying. 

And yet, something about their dimly-lit gray area never failed to draw him in and loosen his guard. Smoke gathered in the corners of their relationship -- a muffling blanket of lies and self-deception; it was the half-time intermission between good and evil, and Slade was leaning over the balcony with the only thing that interested him more than the entire stinking show. 

“Polynesian,” he shrugged. “There might be some Polynesian in there.”

“Okay, but,” Dick rocked over his toes. “Can you be… _more_ specific?”

“Little shit.” Slade scowled. “You already _knew_ \-- ”

He interrupted him by closing his grin over the corner of his mouth. The cold pads of his thumbs braced against his cheekbones, and blunt nails scratched through his scruff.

“Mm,” Slade approved, before he could help it. 

Nightwing kissed him twice more, long and lazy and infuriatingly off-center, and pulled away before he could make it even. Deathstroke tongued at the corners of his mouth. Any sort of touch left ghosts behind.

“I don’t think we’ve been in the same place, not since -- ”

“Uberwald.”

“Yeah,” said Dick. “And your avatar, was... not you.” 

“And yours was all of _thirteen_ years old -- ”

“Like that would’ve stopped you.”

“No, but I’d’ve thought hard about it. And adjusted my moral compass afterwards.”

“Liar.”

Dick pulled on his belt and Slade forced their mouths together. He tried to take but instead gave a little more than he intended. 

“Ouch.” Nightwing drew away. “Don't bite.”

“But you liked it so much before.”

He frowned, and shoved at him. “No, I remember. You _ruin_ed that fight. And I know you only did it because you thought you were going to lose.”

“Or maybe,” Slade breathed. “I was sick of your legs flying for my damn face.”

“_Tch_,” Dick clucked at him. “You love it. You dream of my legs in your face. You want me to call you _Strokey_.”

The vigilante ducked Deathstroke's swing with unsurprising foresight, parried an attempt at a grapple, and slid out of reach when Slade dipped to knock out his knees. In the same breath he stepped close again, pivoted around his back and passed silently over the deck. Slade followed him into the cockpit. 

“Can I drive?”

“No.” He decided. “But you can sit in my lap.”

“Ha-ha,” the detective mocked. Funny how his early adolescent rasp had settled into something sort of mellow and sweet. “Scenes from Slade’s fantasy world, Take One.” 

The hood lights glowed dull cherry red. Evening puddled over the horizon in darkening violet hues, deep folds in a cast-aside cloak. Dick circled the pilot’s chair but did not sit. He leaned on the dash, skimmed his hands over the control panel, cast a critical eye over his presets. An image arose in Slade’s pain-frayed mind of a robin hopping around the edge of a neighbor’s nest. Pecking at broken things. 

Deathstroke snorted to himself. Shut the thought out. 

“Take Two,” he corrected softly, stopping in the anterior to deshelf a bottle of popskull and dash a few fingers into his cup. Copper, handle-less. Bee emblem -- it was Hive merchandise; Slade didn’t find it morbid at all. It wasn’t an artifact of his ex-wife’s demise, it was a _cup_. 

“Uberwald doesn’t count!”

Slade shrugged. “Fine.” What was it he'd said? A few weeks ago. _The truth, more or less._ As if there was anything more or less than the truth.

He sat in the pilot’s chair. Nightwing perched over the arm of the passenger seat and extended his legs over the narrow causeway into his lap. Stealth gear, Slade noted; not boots exactly but black socks with heavy tread -- lightly-armored calves. He eyed the break in plating just under his knee where he’d sunk his teeth, that one time. It wasn’t a proud moment but he didn’t regret it.

“How many people have you ever cared about?”

Slade jerked back to reality just in time to question his sanity. It was the only contingency he couldn’t really plan for; there was no box on the wall with a plaque that read: _In case of lost sanity, break glass._

“That’s a, strangely poignant question, little bat.”

“What’d you just call me?”

Slade stifled a burp, leaned over their legs to put his cup down, and settled his hand in a loose clasp around Nightwing’s outside knee. 

“What’re you drinking?” Dick seized the copper artifact and held it up to his nose. 

“Whiskey.”

“Smells toxic.”

“Bad whiskey.” Slade amended. “Popskull.”

He took a tentative sip. “Thought I smelled something on you. Figured you were trying to drug me.”

“Do you feel drugged?”

“No,” he admitted. “But you never know. Some of these sedatives, now -- I’ve heard they just feel like a nice dream.”

Slade snorted, kicked one heel up against his dashboard. “I _wish_ I had dope like that.”

Nightwing’s brow eased into a neutral line. “Does it hurt?”

Stupid question.

The armor-clad shins over his legs whispered against each other; Dick withdrew just one, stepped up and over the levy between them, and arrived firmly in the spotlight of what he guessed they were now calling visions from Slade’s fantasy world: Take One. Nightwing knocked his hand aside and arranged his limbs precisely in the gaps in his defenses. Deathstroke had been military meat almost as far back as he could remember -- then a martial artist, enhanced mercenary -- but he still occasionally tripped over unseen obstacles and banged his head on low ceilings. Dick probably hadn’t taken a hard fall since he was three years old and tottering around the circus shooting rubber bands at people’s knees. Slade was made into a beast but the kid was born one. 

"Awesome," murmured Nightwing. "I finally have a dark-side booty call."

Slade raised his eyebrows, again. "Is that a thing?"

The young hero sealed his lips, made a big show of leaning back and looking aloft. "You didn't hear anything from me."

"I need, _names_, Dick." But his smile said he wouldn't talk.

Something was off and Slade lifted his hand once more to the gentle sloping column of his throat. The hood lights cast Nightwing's pale skin in pink hues. He walked his fingers over four key junctures of his cervical spine and thumbed again at the seam of his mask.

“You never took this off.”

“I forget it’s on, sometimes.” 

But when Slade had just the edge lifted the little Bat shifted, dodged -- didn’t bat him away this time but turned his head and set his teeth in the material over the tip of his middle finger. The mercenary reflexively withdrew his hand and abandoned his glove to the bite. Dick dropped it and sat forward. “Okay,” he said.

Permission granted, Deathstroke lifted his hand again, almost twitchy with the memories of rejection. _Crap_, he cursed inwardly. 

At first brush, Slade found the flat of Death’s cheek cold as the teenager’s hands, but it warmed quickly under his palm. The detective’s tired blue eyes bruised darkly under the evening’s violet gown. The Gothic vigilante vibe crumbled to dust in the sweet crease of his brow. _Yours for mine, _Slade thought. Front for front.

Dick rubbed his knuckles into his eyes, shrugged his shoulders high, then relaxed with a thin sigh. His mouth tilted on one side. “Should we make a safe word?”

_Little shit._ Slade tucked the mask into his pocket. “If we had a safe word you would abuse it to manipulate me.”

Nightwing shifted his hips. “Now where would I have learned something like that?”

“I -- don’t know what you’re trying to imply.”

“Oh really,” he hummed. Slade managed to brace himself the moment before hands swarmed into his hair, fell to his shoulders; then Dick tugged sharply on the clasps of his vest under each armpit. “Do you need help getting out of this?”

“I told you,” he growled, utterly helpless. “I don’t need your help -- ”

Dick shushed him. “It’s okay, man.” Deft fingers started to manipulate the clasps. “I don’t often run into you in these _hurt/comfort_ scenarios. I, uh, can’t even picture how it would go down, honestly. But I won’t tell anyone about it, I swear.”

“I’ve heard _that_ before.”

Nightwing clicked his tongue. The vest came loose and Deathstroke allowed his sash and outer armor to be removed. “Who would believe me, anyway?”

“I love your hair,” he said, suddenly mouthing behind Slade’s ear. One hand carved over the side of his head to fist itself in the longer cowl-flattened spikes at his crown.

Dick was always saying things like that. Well, he’d never said _that_ before, but he loved his techniques, he copied his style; Dick called him scum to his face but still had a bit of respect left for him, apparently. Did he love _him?_ Slade wondered. Would he ever let him off this fucking diving board? He didn’t like the looks of the tiny pail of water down below, but anything was better than waiting around to be saved.

“Slade.”

Unsure how to ask for what he wanted, Slade waited for Nightwing to provide him with more. The young detective preoccupied himself with driving a searing brand into the juncture between his neck and shoulder in the language of teeth and tongue. Slade wrapped his arm around his back and did his best to combine them.

“Drive.”

“Hm?”

Nightwing lifted his head. “Open your eye, and _drive_.”

When Slade hesitated, he snapped again: “You said you would.”

“I don’t like you in my blind spot.”

In answer, the vigilante swiveled his hips and leaned along the entirety of Slade's blind side, tucked his face in his neck and nipped unkindly at the thin skin over some important blood vessels. “I’m going to get you out of this,” his hand travelled over his under-armor, down his side and settled in a grip on his belt. “The least you can do is take us around the city one time. Give it five -- ten-thousand feet, if you’re nervous.”

Dick kissed him full-on, open and mean, and licked into his mouth almost immediately. _Baby bird_, Slade thought dimly. I can give you what you need. 

Nightwing chuckled against him. “What’d you just call me?”

How the fuck. Slade felt for the brake and started to pull the ship out of hover. He was perfectly comfortable navigating an airship with one hand and a teenager in his lap. No sweat. Nobody accused Slade Wilson of nerves. 

It wasn’t like an accidental companionship forged in a far-off virtual hell and a few phone calls could possibly yield any serious outcome. He’d never thought of him that way, really. Dick was just a talented sidekick he used to terrorize. It wasn’t as if he’d go out of his way to shack up with somebody who only barely didn’t want him dead -- 

Slade nearly slapped his remaining hand to his brow. The ship fell a few meters, then continued its ascent. Of _course_ he would. It was almost like he had a damn type.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> big thanks to all who left feedback/kudos <3  



	6. popskull (mirror land)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my favorite artists just dropped and  
folks -- it's a  
perfect day to drink tequila
> 
> here we go

The night sky was just tucking in its pale corners when they reached the outskirts of Gotham. The ache left behind by the dying day finally subsided, and Slade’s soul sat tidy in his being.

It wasn’t winter yet but it was cold enough that the taste of burning fossil fuels was thick and foul on the air. As the artificial heat rose the cold air would fall, trapping byproduct fumes at ground zero in a layer of impenetrable white smog; Gotham’s suburbs drowned in it, all but the tallest steeples and spires.

When they passed the city’s outer limits, Dick went still as stone, closed his eyes and sucked in the city stank, bit down on it -- a priestly breath for the infested wreck. Slade never understood the reverence the Bats held for Gotham. Bunch of damned fanatics, if you asked him. The city was a blight; you went there for the freezing rain, smog, thunderstorms and violent muggings, or not at all. Even black market activity had slowed in the area in the past few years as syndicate crime groups flushed out smaller players. The new mayor’s highly anticipated beautification project had amounted to a dozen flower boxes and an abandoned steel mill. 

Gotham had the stink of something that had long since been brought down, laid out, and worked over. People had moved on. Time moved on.

Nothing beautiful would ever come of it. 

Slade reached a cruising altitude he didn’t feel too exposed by -- a height at which the buildings below didn’t offend him so -- and he was about to set the auto-pilot function when an alarm went off over the dashboard: dew point monitor, flashing red. Inclement weather. He lost altitude.

The hot, mixed smells of petrol, petrichor and dead leaves filled the cabin. Nightwing breathed greedily. 

The ventilation system kept the air moving all around but Slade felt Dick’s breath tickling like a knife-point along his neck. “You knew there would be a storm tonight.”

Nightwing _hmm_ed with an interrogative edge. “Lift your arm. _This_ one.”

Slade leaned into him to reach the controls for the ship’s anti-balance tabs. The moment his chin was over his shoulder Dick found a grip under the hem of his under-armor and stripped him of several layers, down to his last defenses. He felt a chill between his shoulder blades.

A tidal wave of storm winds bellied up under the port side wing. Slade pulled the wheel and hit three switches to disable his lead slats and trim the starboard side into a shallow dive. 

Nightwing hummed again. “You cleaned it?”

Slade grunted. He’d thrown half a bottle of popskull over it. “I’m trying to navigate.”

“You cauterize it?”

“Does it _look_ like I cauterized it?” He snapped. 

“Yeah,” said Dick. “Let me show you where it looks like you cauterized it -- ”

Too late, he registered the note of capricious malice in his voice and turned to address it; in time to see Dick fist his hand in the material of his shirt and try ripping it off his injured arm. Lacerating pain lit up every center in his brain. Slade swore raggedly. 

“Fuck are you -- ” He started, incoherent rage.

“You seared your _sleeve_ onto your _stump_.” 

The mercenary eyed a cluster of thunderheads on the horizon and hastily adjusted course. They were carving over the eastern city limits. “The name-calling is unnecessary.”

“I didn’t -- ”

“I can hear it.”

Dick sighed. “Deathstroke.”

“So it was a rush job,” said Slade, compelled to come to his own defense. “Just evading the fuckers took three hours and half my fuel reserves. The original engine took a hydrostatic blast. I had to lay low -- and I mean, fucking, _low_, kid -- for two days straight. _You_ try nailing surgical cauterization scraping around under a monorail in Quebec. I was heating a K-Bar with a popped fuel cell and an oxygen tank.”

Nightwing adjusted his weight and for a moment his head dipped below eye-level. Slade felt a trace of touch on the outside of his leg, and then the disorienting chill of being disarmed. Dick straightened back up wielding the K-bar in question. “Kinda thick,” he said, toying with the tip of the blade. It had a sheen like rainbows on an oil spill. “Why this one?”

“It’s Damascus steel; all my other blades are powder-coated, cro-van varieties. And, the Bowie was too short -- ” He cut the ship’s dive a little sharper than he would’ve liked, and sacrificed a smooth ride to avoid a jet of humid air on the event horizon of another thunderhead. Dick braced himself against the headrest, and shot a look over his shoulder like he was unimpressed or something. 

“What happened to that cool machete?”

“I was _left_-handed.”

“Uh? Oh.” Dick shifted again. “At least you didn’t lose any of these nice tantos. I like your Asian flare.”

“That’s an American tanto.”

“On three, okay? One -- ”

Slade heard the soft song of ringing steel a heartbeat before the return of the malicious, burning pain, and he choked on a shallow breath like he’d been impaled through the chest, totally unprepared. He glanced aside to see the young vigilante detach his shirt from his arm. He’d cleaned the wound as best he could under the circumstances, but throwing alcohol over it hadn’t entirely washed away the wine-stains of losing half his blood supply all over his arm.

“I can’t _do_ this and drive a ship -- ”

Nightwing snorted. “Yes, you can. I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately, but I watched your last couple jobs, and -- ”

“And _what?_” Slade eyed the storm eyeing them, searching for a break in the chaos. He only needed five minutes of auto-pilot. He only needed to drag him a few inches closer. 

Dick sighed. Not a tired sigh, or a too-old one. It was small, and perfect; he was fucking with his elders, and smarter than most of them, too. 

“Look,” he said, as if Slade had anything better to do. “I was raised in the faith but I don’t believe all the lies. I think everybody’s happy when they’re dead. But… you’re sloppy, lately. Slade. That’s all. It used to be pretty tough to catch you in the field but now I’ve got a new hit on you every month. The bounty on your head is picking up zeroes _overnight_.”

“So?”

Dick lifted his hands. “I’m just calling it like I see it, here. You’re not running from the grave, dude -- you’re more like, edging slowly away from it.”

“Fuck off,” the mercenary suggested. “I’m immortal, basically. Most of my life is shitty in-between jobs that don’t make it on television, but I’ve been around a whole _lot_ longer than you so believe me when I tell you, fortune is a fickle little bitch. Luck moves in long waves, and I’m in a dry spell.”

“Okay, but -- the camel job, dude.”

“What about it?”

“Why bother risking your neck renting that rusty schooner out of the desert when you could’ve easily grandfathered a deal -- shift the camels and all the risk onto a third party and walk away with the finder’s fee? You didn’t even _have_ to take the security gig in the first place, as long as you tracked the herd without alerting Shiva -- ”

Slade shook his head. “No. Building trust with the client is essential in situations like that. Especially with sacred shit involved. If I didn’t establish trust first, that whole plan would’ve fallen apart.”

“You just like pissing off entire cultures in person, don’t you?”

“I love it.”

Dick snorted and the small expenditure of breath warmed his collar bone. “I’m starting to get an idea how you work.”

Slade pulled the ship into a wind corridor that would allow him some cruise time at the cost of dipping closer to the city. “And _I’m_ getting an idea what it’s like to be someone close to you. Do you have a specific track of lies for each of your friends, or do you sort them into groups based on how much they still trust you? The Bat was so skilled in puppetry -- of course he would pass it on to you.”

“This will hurt,” said Nightwing. 

Deathstroke was glad for the popskull, because abruptly the tearing sensation in his arm sharpened to a nearby memory of agony: the smell of seared flesh, and a bright red blade. Slade bit down on the inside of his cheek. When he thought he might black out, the fresh pain of impact between his legs brought him back around and he registered Nightwing, a ragged slice of fabric in one hand, his tanto handle-out in the other. A hot and frilly rush of anger. 

“Nice one, Mensa," he growled. "You got me in the nards!”

“Sorry,” said Dick, apathetic. “I thought you were gonna pass out.”

The vigilante leaned around him to sheath the knife again. “That burnt scrap was probably stalling the healing process. I wonder if it’ll grow back now. Or, at least -- stop oozing.”

Once the greater pain of the reinvigorated wound subsided, Slade felt the distant throb of a headache against the back wall of his skull. “I’ve regenerated organs before.” He thought. “Hand should be no different.”

“You did crawl out of that volcano.”

Nightwing shifted again, butterflied his knees over Slade’s legs and settled his head over his blind side. One curious finger slid along the lower meniscus of his eyepatch. 

“No.”

“What?”

“_No._”

“I wasn’t going to do anything.”

Finally Deathstroke saw his opening and kicked his heel on the dash, knocked the auto-pilot toggle into the _on_ position, and caught Nightwing with his hand against his armored side as the movement forced him more securely into the cradle of his hips.

He tackled the underarm latches on the _Dragonfly_ set-up, and Dick helped shrug the rig over his shoulders and onto the floor. His armor, couplets and vest followed. The night sky milled with clouds and Slade saw his time ticking down -- as soon as the Boy Wonder seemed more skin than Kevlar he moved in again, targeting the bow of his lower lip. He pushed his hand under his last layers and up the milk warm curve of his side.

“Why did you force me out in a storm?” 

Nightwing roped his arms around his neck, casually unfolded one leg and snaked forward to test their bodies together, just a shade gentler than a grind. He hummed his answer as an afterthought. “Keep you busy.”

“Right,” Slade snorted, angry. “It’s okay to molest the pilot as long as he’s driving.”

“Not so I could molest you,” Dick chuckled. “So I could look at your arm without holding you down first. Were you just gonna leave it all clogged up like that?”

“I didn’t -- ”

“You didn’t need my help,” Nightwing smiled. “Got it.”

Slade was pissed but the little Bat closed his lips under his eye, then the corner of his mouth. The mercenary purposely butted noses so he’d know they weren’t done fighting, but he didn’t didn’t discourage the young hero from opening his mouth and sealing their lips together. 

There wasn’t any virtual artifice or shroud of panic and survivalism this time; without the imminent threat of death in Uberwald or the strange freedom of occupying a body not his own, Slade was left uncomfortably alone with the fact that he enjoyed Dick’s company.

At least, until the first shot rocketed by, and the second trimmed the leading slats off his starboard wing in a hail of fire. 

“What the -- ” Nightwing reared back. 

“We’re being followed.”

“Why didn’t you _say_ anything!” Dick spat, slipping out of his lap and over to the passenger-side monitors. 

Deathstroke disabled the auto-pilot and took them through a quick range of evasive maneuvers as the attack rained down from above. He brought the ship up hard off the tail-end of the wind chute, and two black silhouettes zipped past the windshield. A hydrostatic burst lit up the sky. 

Dick peered over the dashboard. “Those are Atlantean weapons. Those ships are from -- no, wait, they're from Black Manta.”

The mercenary felt eyes turned on him balefully across the cockpit. “He didn’t give you this ship, did he.”

“No," Slade slapped the port-side slats down and pulled the wheel. Then, calmly: "I said he owed me a favor.”


	7. crash talk

Evading capture in a pursuit among airships was one of the trickier elements of Slade's trade. Even a skilled pilot could throw a chase in a heartbeat; it didn’t take more than a slip of the hand, some extra pressure on the cut-off lever -- a couple of wet leaves on the windshield.

A good pilot was in constant discussion with his surroundings. Whether or not he saved his own ass in a dogfight depended on how accurately he could predict -- and act on -- what was happening now, what _might_ happen next, and then what the deuce was going down later. 

Deathstroke was in denial, fine. But only until it came to his skills. He had one eye and one hand, now, no depth perception and no license to operate an aircraft in any legal language, but Dick was right: Slade basically lived in the cockpit. And in his mind he owned the skies, no matter which titty-ass city they slumped over. 

He’d lost his starboard slats in the first volley, but instead of correcting for the loss he encouraged the defecting wing by erecting his port-side slats and yanking the pronged nose of the ship into an upward spiral. He heard some earthy words from his passenger and the rustle and click of a seatbelt. 

“Can you get the weapons system online?”

“Why wasn’t it al_ready?_” Nightwing spat. Nevertheless, Slade saw him reach for the navigation controls on the copilot side. 

A missile spitballed across the horizon and exploded inside a nearby thunderhead, and he banked hard to avoid the resultant shock wave. Dick scoffed and faintly _tsk_ed as if Slade had personally conspired to fire on himself, and miss, too. 

“All the instructions are in Atlantean.” The mercenary explained.

“You don’t know _Atlantean?_”

Deathstroke certainly didn’t know shame but the tone in the adolescent’s voice dealt a scathing blow and a few outer layers of his skin discorporated under the pressure.

“I _know_ it. I don’t _read_ it -- ”

“So you’re just illiterate.”

Slade punched the throttle with his right hand, steadied the wheel with the remainder of his left arm and braced himself against the foot-pedals as the ship plunged. The changing air pressure inside the clouds played havoc with his pursuers’ weaponry; it was like flying through an underwater minefield of heat-seeking ballistics, all drifting in dumb suspension and prone to spontaneous combustion. Another explosion seared the hull and a dark inkblot of smoke started to bleed from his starboard wing.

“Oh good, we lost a turbine.” 

“There’s a back-up,” said Slade. “Are you in yet?”

“I’m trying,” he said, with the lofty impatience of a genius being stalled three seconds. “It’s not like Kaldur’s tech -- what’s with all these damn initialization sequences? There’s no way this ship has eight-_hun_dred weapons’ systems…”

A moment later: “Holy shit. What the hell are we driving?”

Slade was losing altitude faster than a hot meteorite. A cluster of clouds like a floating citadel sailed Gotham's dark bay waters; he’d been avoiding them all evening but suddenly it seemed like his best bid for survival. Slade plotted a course and led the ship in a long swing over the ribbing waters and then directly up into the eye of the storm system. The cabin rattled like a 90s roller coaster over a gas-powered track, vents blasted hurricane winds over the dash and Slade sneezed over the strain of holding the wheel steady. Ten different alarms flashed vigorously on the console: the dew point monitor was going nuts. 

“Fire something,” he grit.

“What?”

“Anything.” 

Nightwing swore. Slade watched the two fast-moving dots on his threat display as they closed pincer-like around his signal. 

The hood lights dimmed and Deathstroke was about to congratulate his copilot on killing them both when the glow returned, ultraviolet blue. The wheel vibrated. Outside, hydrostatic energy collected under his ship's basal plate and expanded outward in a crackling ring. For an instant, Gotham’s thick cobweb cover of cloud lit up with a blast like daylight. A moment later, the distant sound of a sonic boom caught up to their ears and everything in a 200-meter radius erupted in a carousel of electric shocks. One of their pursuers fell out of the sky. The other vanished.

“Okay -- remember that one.”

“Are you kidding?” said Nightwing. “Did you see the speed of that blast wave? We could've hit the city!”

“A bonus.”

Dick sat back hastily as Slade veered out of the clouds and shoved his palm heel-down over the throttle; the ship dived again. 

“What’re you doing?”

“Those were probably scouts.”

“So?”

“So -- they probably called for help.” said Slade, slowly. “Would you like to lead their back-up forces to your Cave, or shall I take us into the city to lie low?”

“Alright, I get it.” He slid down in the seat and groaned childishly. “Just do it.”

“Something wrong, Dick?” The mercenary, conversational. 

“It’s my night _off_. Beta is on assignment, Alpha squad is on call, _Gamma_ is on call, and Barbara was standing by specifically for Gotham -- all I wanted to do was eat my noodles, drink my tea, maybe go for a late swim before bed. _Why_ do my off-days always end in, fucking, aerial combat?”

“Because you called me?” Deathstroke suggested. At five-thousand feet the smog whippled and folded quietly around them.

Nightwing lifted one hand and applied pressure around his temples with the other. “_Don’t_ get cute.”

Slade shook his head, startled and mildly amused by the venom in his voice. He opened his mouth to respond.

“Because you’re _not_.” 

“ -- I stole this whip for you, though.”

“Slade, stop.”

“You don’t like it?”

“I -- what is that?” Dick cut sharply, shifting in his seat. “What is that thing on your face?”

“Huh?” The funny thing was, it was the angriest he’d seen him in a while. Helpless, Slade felt the thing in question growing larger. 

“Are you _smiling?_”

Deathstroke pushed his hand under his sleeveless shirt -- one of those silly G-unit numbers with the square cut -- and scratched at the white-gray thatch over his chest. “I don’t think so. The drug must be kicking in.”

“You’re a poor liar when you’re smug.” Dick crossed his arms. “Pretty pathetic, man, that this is your idea of fun.”

“A-ha,” Slade felt his teeth bared and wished for his mask. “This coming from the kid who wore the skin of a stinking hell-hound just to sneak through the gates to an interdimensional war-hole.”

“I thought we agreed not to talk about Uberwald.”

“We didn’t.”

The fog broke and Slade scowled at the skyline, lousy with the unnatural shapes of civilization. Nothing took the thrill out of a narrow escape like the sight of the smoldering city of Gotham. He reached over his console and held down a switch to engage the secondary windshields. 

“Seal the bypasses in the forward engines, please.”

“Seal the -- ” Nightwing frowned hard over his lightboard. “There aren’t any bypasses; it says we’re running an in-line -- ”

“The original engines were hit,” he reminded him. 

“So what’d you replace them with?” Dick issued the challenge. “Not a _four_-wide?”

“I like the handling better on a standard four-wide -- ”

“Screw the handling!” He crowed. “It’s a waste of potential in a ship like this, if you ask me. The in-line models are cheaper, easier to install, and they could take you to _Mach 5_.”

“No one asked you.” said Deathstroke. “And I don’t want Mach 5, I want tight turns and high-energy airflow without assisted forward motion, which makes _sense_ in a ship with a well-defined keel.”

“Well you’ll definitely be getting those tight turns,” the young hero muttered. “From all the extra drag created by your double-wide gas-guzzlers.”

“That’s a _myth_ and you know it; there’s no more drag with the standard than the in-line -- that’s a play of marketing misinformation to draw in the sheep, and it won’t be working on me. The four-wide has ceramic insets; it doesn’t melt its own casing like the in-lines do and the whole rig didn’t cost me anything because I swapped it out of a junkyard.”

“Right where the four-wide belongs,” Nightwing murmured.

“Just _seal_ the bypasses.” Slade sighed. “I sub-routed the controls through the anti-icing.”

“Nice,” said the teenager, dry as hell in a drought. “I suppose you won’t be needing any anti-icing, being limited to subsonic speeds.”

The mercenary had to take a stand eventually. “Look, kid, I’m not actually trying to impress you.” He scratched at his chest. “But, when did _subsonic_ suddenly become grampy driving?”

“You said it, not me.” The secondary shields finally sealed around them. Dick sat up. “The light’s different -- looks like the Manta helmet, actually.”

Slade weighed his palm down on the throttle and let gravity suck the nose of the ship down. Gotham’s dark bay waters loomed up at them. 

“Oh,” said the vigilante, lowering his hands over the armrests. “Submarine visors. It can dive, too.”

At an angle of descent expertly tuned to around 15-degrees, Slade’s vessel cut the frothing waves like a hot knife gliding through arteries. The cabin pressure adjusted accordingly and external lighting glimmered to life along the tri-pronged keel. Turbines became propellers slicing evenly through the water. Overall the transition was so smooth all he really felt was a slight tightening around his temples. 

“Dope,” Nightwing hummed. He jumped up to peer over the deck. Like it was the aquarium, or something, and not Gotham’s viscous underwater graveyard. 

Slade reclaimed his copper cup and retreated to the anterior. He pretended not to notice his passenger slip into the pilot seat. Flying was actually pretty tiring work. 

“Feeling the aster?” Cheeky shit.

Slade grunted an affirmative. He considered liquor and uttered the voice command for coffee instead. The best thing about the ship’s coffee protocol was it could hear you from bed. 

“Probably seven minutes before we can risk surfacing.” He considered.

“Any ideas?”

Slade left the Hive mug in the wall panel while the built-in system steamed and hissed. He’d set the auto-pilot to drift well below sea-level, nearby but off the coastline. 

It was this weird spandex-polyester blend, he decided, pulling on his chest hairs, that was making him so uncomfortable. It occurred to him that he typically only existed in one of two states: full gear or naked. The shirt never bothered him under his armor.

When Slade didn’t like things he made them go away. He fisted his hand behind his opposite shoulder blade and pulled off the offending garment. 

“I meant ideas for evading the _cavalry_, Slade.”

He shrugged. “Lose ‘em in the city.”

“And your Plan B?”

Slade edged back into the cockpit and relaxed into the copilot's chair, kicked his heels over the dash. “My copilot calls in a swarm of stand-by super friends to hold them off while I sneak away.”

Instead of dignifying the suggestion with a response, he side-eyed him. Nightwing had a simply calamitous side-eye. Then: “How long are you going to look like that?”

Slade crossed his remaining hand over his belt. “Forever.”

Dick snorted. 

“Seven minutes,” he reminded him. “What are we going to do?”

“Six, now.” Nightwing snapped. “And I think the question is, what _can_ you do?”

Slade felt the thing on his face again. “Little Bat,” he pushed himself up and circled the pilot's chair. “Just remember that you asked.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ;)
> 
> thanks for reading. pls send love.
> 
> up next
> 
> _six minutes_


	8. six minutes (energy)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> now with art!!  
fresh-  
pressed  

> 
> please enjoy

  


Six minutes to a vigilante or a career mercenary like Slade was the equivalent of an average citizen’s lazy Sunday afternoon. It didn’t come around a lot, so free time had to be used to its utmost capacity.

Slade leaned. He pushed his good arm around the teenager in the pilot’s chair and curled his hand under his magnificent ass. Dick had the presence of mind to twist his arms around his neck before he lifted. 

“Hold up, are you sure you can -- ?”

“Of course I can,” he grunted. “I know you’re playing at being grown now, but you’re not there yet. And you’ll always be that little robin to me.” Of course, an acrobatic ability to compensate without supports also helped. Dick could balance over a coat hanger. 

Nightwing’s response was to smile -- not nicely, never nicely -- in the capricious way he had before tearing at Slade’s wound, and the mercenary prepared himself to be accosted. But the vigilante only relaxed and made a small amorous noise in his ear; Deathstroke had never felt so thoroughly and multi-dimensionally _mocked_ by a single gesture, so much so that he forced him against the wall in the anterior before continuing on, just to remind him that he didn’t care. Certainly not to rest or wonder when that mouthy sidekick became approximately man-sized. 

Slade’s left arm was no more use than a soft and unwieldy crowbar, but it served its pathetic purpose in bracing Batman’s protege against the cramping arch of the anterior wall --

Until Nightwing snorted, and brushed it aside. Then, soft as fucking angel shit: “Don’t touch me with that, man. Gross.”

“There are no familial feelings here,” Deathstroke began, still wound up from before. “Not paternal, not _fra_ternal. In fact, let’s cut it at feelings, period. I don’t think of you as a friend, or a colleague. Not even an acquaintance. It’s more like we race in traffic on the way to work sometimes.”

The vigilante looked on through him, eyes sharp and steady. One side of his mouth hitched up. It bothered Slade that Dick didn’t have to call him a liar anymore for him to hear it. 

Part of him wished he never went along with any of it in the first place. Not just getting caught up in the flirting and the semantics and flying his dumb ass out in a storm, either -- before that: the kid set a trap for him. Clever Bat. Talked him in and he fell for it; Slade heaved that stinking pelt over his shoulders and fell into Uberwald. And he guessed he’d never really stopped falling, after that. 

“Is that your bunk?”

Slade looked where his eyes pointed. 

“Uh-huh. But there’s guns in it right now.”

Nightwing and Nightwing’s narrow-eyed amusement slipped out of his hold and made for the rungs to the ship’s upper fuselage -- a narrow cavity he used mostly for storage and occasionally for lying down. 

“None of them are loaded,” he added. “So don’t get any ideas.” 

Slade rooted through his supplies for gauze, at least, and some surface bandaging, but if he was honest leaving Dick unsupervised with his guns made him nervous -- like the vigilante was going to turn them _against_ him, somehow -- and he did a substandard job wrapping stumpy. He was pleased to note the wound was already beginning to seal off, though, despite sitting inside his sleeve stalled in its own juices for a few days. Slade could feel the tell-tale ache and stir of a gnawing hunger turning in the pit of his stomach: a good sign that his body was preparing to regenerate something big or important. He could regenerate under any circumstances -- even trapped under ten fathoms of volcanic ash -- but it helped speed the process along by a lot if he was well-fed and safe enough to lay low for a few days. As it was, he had too much heat on him from Manta’s cronies to park his shit for seven minutes, let alone enough time to grab a sandwich and some shut-eye. 

Slade only cleared the final rung, ducked his head, and set his knees in the soft but military-thin material of his bed when one cool palm alighted on the side of his neck. Dick kissed him and the mercenary let him. He opened his eye and did a quick count of his inventory, though, anyway. Nothing was missing. He’d do a scan later for electronic warfare. 

Abruptly he found the whole scenario sort of foolishly romantic. Making out in a bunk. Like boot camp, again -- his as_sault_ rifles laying around and shit. He almost laughed. 

He didn’t laugh but he did kind of bare his teeth and Nightwing stopped kissing him but didn’t back off. Deathstroke didn’t want to fucking nuzzle but he was too busy to shove him away and his cool fingers felt _damned_ good carving nasty rough over his head. Slade engaged his good arm, pulled him to, and shuffled forward to lay him down amongst the weapons. Just for insurance he straddled the young hero low over the knees and set about shifting some of his collection around to make room. 

“For some reason I thought you’d kiss like a _nine_-year-old.”

Dick rolled his eyes. “For some reason, I thought you’d be better at the flattery portion of wooing.”

Slade shrugged. “I’m much better at straight-talk.”

“How is that working for you?”

“Poorly.”

Most of the guns ended up against the wall of the narrow cavity. He twisted off a couple of the blades and bayonets, too, just in case. Dim submarine light slid over the detective in waving gold bars. 

Dick took advantage of his distraction to adjust. Slade felt him shifting underneath him, and was fine with his hips between his legs until the adolescent bucked and the absolute pressure of a hard-on knocked against his ass. 

“A-ha,” Slade steadied him with a hand on the side of his belly. “I don’t think so, boy.” He warned. “I always top.”

“You _are_ on top, technically.” He flicked his dark eyebrows at him. “I’ll let you call me ‘master’.”

“No.”

“Sir?”

“_No._”

“So you can call me ‘kid’ and ‘_boy_’ but I can’t rock the big pimping pa_ternal_ card?”

“You can call me ‘daddy’,” Slade offered. “I never said no to that.”

“You just did a minute ago!”

“I said no to _feelings_, Dick. We can pick out demeaning sex roles as soon as you like. Now take off your shirt.”

Nightwing rolled his eyes and exhaled audibly through his nose but he obeyed, with grumbles: “Take off your pants, then, _papi_.”

  


Righty took care of his belt okay by itself but Slade had to roll to the side and fumble with his crowbar to kick off the rest. 

“Christ,” Dick swore lightly. “You’re like one of those old dudes with amazingly youthful legs.”

Deathstroke settled back over his knees in just his shorts. “What is that, a compliment?”

Nightwing shrugged his shoulders. Shadows hid in the creases under his eyes. “Well, yeah. I mean, you’re _old_, obviously. But -- I don’t know. You’re not old.”

“Can’t fall behind the times in _this_ business, kiddo.” said Slade. “I don’t know how it is high on the hilltop, but the second you get outmoded in my part of the woods is the second you go down -- down hard: baked into little cakes and passed around at the next evil board meeting. I’m basically an antique but I stay on top of my shit.”

Dick smiled in a feckless, unbothered way, and he tipped his head to the side, almost to his shoulder. “That’s not what I mean, exactly.”

Deathstroke planted his hand and leaned over to accept the invitation. 

The prospect of having a long-sought prize beneath him was exhilarating, though, and when he finally did see his shadow crash over the young hero Slade followed its example and fell wholly into the shallow valleys and buried planes of pale skin, everything he never really didn’t think about under the kevlar. He suspected he’d given in to impulse when Dick actually fought back. 

The mercenary retreated. He caught the knuckle headed for his windpipe, and managed to block the other on its way to his groin.

“Relax, relax,” Slade demanded, mildly alarmed -- grimly entertained. Tension was rolling off the vigilante in waves and he should’ve known growing up in their ways would leave wounds deeper than skin and bone. Slade turned over the fist in his hand and pressed his mouth to the heart of his palm, then released it. You didn’t talk anyone out of a panic, really.

But. He didn’t have any better ideas. And it would be a shame to accidentally knock unconscious his shot at a satisfying five minutes.

“Hey,” he began. “Remember the Neuropa Concert -- which level was it?”

“Forty-four.”

“That’s right.” He hummed. “Colder than Chinese hell. Deep freeze far as the eye could see -- oceans of methane under fifteen kilometers of nitrogen ice. It went hours on end snowing silica _diamonds_. When all the suns eclipsed, the temperatures dropped so low you came to bed with me the first night. Remember that?”

“No, _you_ crawled up to _me_.”

Was that how it happened? Slade thought. “I didn’t want you to freeze to death with just your dignity.”

“You were freezing to death too, jackass!”

“Uberwald was so unifying, that way. There’s no distance between us, just energy.”

“Do you really believe that?” 

Slade glanced down, considering. He stroked his side with his only hand. “Sometimes.”

Nightwing seemed sufficiently calmed but the mercenary still hesitated when he beckoned him closer. “Don’t punch me in the nuts.” He said. 

The vigilante aired an exasperated sigh, which Slade didn’t really think was fair. _He_ should be exasperated. He was the one under attack. “I _won’t_, I’m sorry. You surprised me, I -- I blanked.”

“Don’t talk any more shit about the four-wide engine, either.”

Deathstroke nosed under the shadow of his jaw and felt Dick’s gentle snort against his ear. “No promises.”

Slade clipped his teeth over the side of his neck and when Nightwing didn’t resist he tried again, harder -- rewarded by the audible _-ck!_ of his back molars colliding and the sound of Dick’s sharp intake of breath. The adolescent rippled beneath him and the mercenary lowered himself over his elbow to rough their hips together.

“Slade,” he heard, and lifted to taste his name on his tongue. Dick opened his mouth, warm and accommodating. Hands moved in precisely the opposite fashion, firm and purposeful across the downside of Slade’s jaw, scraping through the stray flock of stubble on his neck. A moment later cold fingers sank into the crests under his collarbones and a few of the mercenary’s sore muscles cried out under the pressure. If Slade trusted him to use their time wisely he would happily roll over just for more of his punishing touch.

The vigilante murmured unintelligibly and Deathstroke imagined he might need to breathe, after all this time; he left his lips swollen and dipped to delve his tongue into his supersternal notch. Nightwing’s chest heaved with trapped breath. Slade drew the tip of his nose down his centerline, along the pale plateau of one pectoral, and he was just considering sinking his teeth into the blushing pink peak of his nipple when one arm tightened around his neck in a vice and the other secured it at the elbow in a dangerous sleeper hold -- 

Slade abruptly choked and resisted his first instinct to disable the threat. 

Which might not’ve been such a simple thing to do, anyway, as all the tubes in his throat were being squashed flat. Gods be _damn_ed, he had the arm-strength of about four-hundred rubber bands. Black sparks flew over his vision.

“_Richard_,” Slade wheezed quietly. Where was the _off_-switch on this traumatized piece of shit? “I want to suck you off a lot more than I want to kill you.”

The mercenary was beginning to woefully consider violent reprisal when Nightwing finally relaxed. Slade took several silent breaths to recover, and he waited for the so-called hero to issue an apology or some idiot quip or one-liner or even just _smirk_ at him but all he did was look on and card his fingers through his hair again like nothing ever happened. Tired blue eyes. Slade continued to slide down. He exhaled over his navel for a few turns, resisted the urge to set his teeth in the crest of his hip, and slipped his thumb under the band of his shorts.

“I’ve made it this far without losing my mind,” he hummed. “What’s your excuse?” 

“I don’t think,” Dick paused, grimaced. “Now’s the time.”

Slade considered this, while dragging his thumb through the thick brush of dark hair between his legs. “Good as any,” he decided, and dipped to pass his tongue over the head of his cock in a few long tries. 

The detective shuddered. “I don’t think you’d understand.”

Slade curled his back, took him halfway, and pulled off. He dug his thumb into the inside of one lean hip. He couldn’t really describe how much he missed having two hands at this moment. “Try me.”

For a while Nightwing didn’t answer. The mercenary shifted himself between his legs and shrugged one over his shoulder, pressed his ear to his inner thigh and led his hand up the leg of his shorts into a plush grip of glute. Even his asscheeks were cool to the touch. 

Nightwing lengthened his leg and Slade felt the catlike stretch and purr of muscle activity from the tips of his fingers to the shell of his ear. Dark little prodigy -- thought he could throw a pout during a blow job, for Christ’s sake. 

“It’s a malady of the soul, I guess.”

_Oof,_ Slade thought, sitting up straighter. He heard loud and clear the implicit _you soulless bastard_ but didn’t bother hassling the young hero about name-calling when the overall sentiment was so fucking joyless. 

“You’re too young for those.” 

He knew it was a shit answer -- it didn’t even make for a convincing cop-out. Slade had lived a long life but that didn’t make him any good at giving advice, especially not when it concerned someone he was familiar with -- and an issue he was a fucking expert on. 

It had never worked for him before but the mercenary said the thing on the forefront of his mind: “Just, keep it together, alright?”

Dick sat up on his elbows and smiled wearily at him. More light ushered in through the upper gills of the ship and fell over his right-side ribs in piano keys of liquid gold. He flexed the leg over his shoulder and Deathstroke shrugged it against him, turned his nose into his knee. It wasn’t an embrace exactly but intimacy sort of sprung from it, unbidden, and Slade shut the feeling out. He nipped at a familiar spot under the crease of his knee and folded forward to return to his task -- Dick bent his leg to accommodate the change and Slade felt the gentle brush of his sole between his shoulder blades. It was actually kind of nice and he took a moment to leave some jealous bites in the richest and palest parts of his inner thigh. He paused near his destination just long enough to free his hand and slick two fingers to the root, then wrapped his arm back around the vigilante’s backside and bowed forward onto his cock. 

Nightwing exhaled in long, furious plumes, murmured his name in quiet turns. Slade found his strain satisfying but he wanted a bit more, so he tipped forward, and when Dick’s hips rose to meet him Slade swallowed and used the angle to slide his spit-slicked fingers in around his rim. He knew traditionally the process moved from one to two, but the vigilante had ripped off his sleeve at the count of _one_, earlier, so Slade didn’t hesitate to start with two. Besides, he wanted to see what he could take.

Deathstroke tracked his tongue slowly along the underside of Nightwing’s shaft as he pulled off, stretched his fingers inside the first few inches of soft tissue, and inhaled as he fell forward again. 

“_Slade_ \-- !” Dick’s shout got caught up in a gasp and he hemorrhaged air. That was much better. The mercenary hummed his response, pleased. The young hero began to twist and arch in the blankets, which made his job harder, but also pleased him.

When he bent his free leg Slade muscled his shoulder under it and swallowed again, turning his fingers inside him and down to the knuckles. Dick bucked and moaned and he ignored it, focused on his game right up to the moment Nightwing tensed and the fingers in his hair tightened. The mercenary pulled off but he didn’t pull out when Dick started to come.

Slade sat up on his knees and licked his lips, using his fingers to stroke the teenager rhythmically through his climax. He imagined fucking him through it and glanced down to assess his own status; he was miserably hard. Even his boys were tightening in anticipation, and they knew there wasn’t time enough to get any. The mercenary planned a few willful kidnapping scenarios in his head -- like maybe Dick would fall in love with him if he took all his freedoms away -- _Nah_, he thought, and scrapped them all. Sure, the vision of the young hero strapped down, polished and oiled and blue-eyed glaring next to all his guns was a tempting one, but Slade’s lifestyle didn’t leave room for pets and he really didn’t have the resources for a sex slave. 

“Done?” He started to work his fingers free. Nightwing kicked and moaned pornographically.

“Easy,” he said, more for his own amusement than Dick's benefit. He shifted his twitching legs from his shoulders to his hips, curled his arm under his ass and pulled him into his lap.

“Easy for _you_ to say,” Nightwing settled, without venom. “Invest in lube.”

Deathstroke sucked on his earlobe. The vigilante slid in close and grinded on him generously; Slade hitched his hand to one of his hips and paired the motion with a subsequent pulse of his own. The friction was gratifying enough, and when Nightwing's chest swelled against his, the mercenary felt the energy spread between them and sighed down the stem of his throat. 

Dick lured him into a kiss. All he had to do, really, was look a certain way -- or press his cold fingers under his jaw. He did both, and at the first long stroke of his tongue Slade rutted once against him and uttered a fitful moan. It was around then that the first of his alarms started blaring in the cockpit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i dont know why i  
lost my _shit_  
when grayson  
_papi_'d  
slade  
had to keep it
> 
> thanks yall <3


	9. blue diamond

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yo whaddup. i loved receiving ur kudos/comments. doing a little more~

“Turn up here. Yaw right.”

“...I said_ yaw!_ What are you doing? Yaw now!”

Slade beat Nightwing to the cut-off lever, throwing an elbow, too, like a couple of kids fighting over the blaster on _Robotron 2084_. “Hands off the throttle.” 

No one told Deathstroke the Terminator when to yaw. 

“You _missed_ it! What’re you _do_ing? We could’ve lost them in the warehouse district -- you’re headed straight into the city!”

Slade held the wheel steady. He’d strapped on his armored vest but forgot his shirt, pulled on his pants and foregone the belt. Slopped coffee over his knee. 

It wasn’t the first time Deathstroke found himself in a high-speed pursuit dressed like an extra in a freelance porno -- in fact it called to mind an era of flamboyant synthetic-leather villainy he wouldn’t’ve minded _leav_ing in the eighties with _Robotron_. The concept of flashy cybernetic robots overcoming human society was so overwrought. And the chafe, unbelievable.

“The only thing getting lost in the warehouse district,” Slade informed the vigilante. “Is another warehouse.”

Nightwing blew a terrific raspberry. “You’ve got about ten guns on you, _Mad Max_. Where are you planning to lay low, then, Main Street? Let’s stop for a shave and a haircut. We could grab a beer. Or how about the football stadium? I think there’s a game going on.”

“I’m no expert, but -- ” Slade hauled on the floor-mounted lever and braced the wheel with his stained knee. The ship banked hard. “The last time I wiped my ass with the local statutes you were still underage. And don’t expect me to be taking tips on how to _lay low _from the free-range _side_kick who can’t even get his hair to lie flat.”

“Sidekick?” Nightwing scoffed. “Was that supposed to burn? Look, man. I know you’re stressed right now. It’s probably not very easy to fly an Atlantean airship with one arm and a gigantic hard-on -- but just because I wasn’t born in 1876 doesn’t mean I’m totally clueless -- ”

_Eighteen seventy -- ?_ “How old do you think I _am?_”

“I know a few tricks, too,” the vigilante continued, aloof. “And I definitely know my way around this city. So drop the Han Solo shit and let me help.”

The brass casing on the aneroid barometer was loose, or its tinny rattle was a form of inanimate laughter at Slade’s misfortune. An explosive volley on his tail led the mercenary into another chaotic spiral of evasive maneuvers. They fell -- inevitably, it seemed -- closer to the city. The east-side commercial borough Raven’s Croft reared up ahead, steeples, spires, and scrapers above the rest. The barometer rattled, atmosphere hissed through the floor vents. Slade wished he had another hand to help compensate for the draft on his injured starboard wing --

A rumble under the chassis. New distress signal lit on the dashboard: there was a fire under the landing gears. 

Slade swore. He swung into a shallow dive and barrel-rolled around the towers of a time-trapped gray cathedral. “That almost hit my Delta fin!”

Another rumble under his feet. He banked again. “They’re _aim_ing for my Delta fin!”

“Watch the historic sites, please.”

Deathstroke glanced at his copilot, and growled. “Are you on your _phone?_” 

Dick braced one heel against the dash as another hail of missiles showered over them. “Technically I’m on the flight deck.”

_Teenagers._ Slade swore again. “You’re hacking my ship!”

“Chill out.” Nightwing whisked him away without looking up. “I wanted a closer look at these protocols. I got into the mainframe, but,” he paused, flicked his forefinger and thumb over his touchscreen, scrolling through reams and reams of data wearing an expression of brutal, technical apathy. “The code -- I don’t recognize some of these arrays, and the dialect -- it’s not Black Manta’s brand of Atlantean.”

“So what?” Slade grunted, sweat leaping out of his goddamn forehead. If he kept operating aircraft single-handedly he was going to develop a right-side bicep like Bane on a bad bender.

“So who’s ship is this, really?”

He chuckled, a little manic. “I honestly don’t know.”

“You jacked the shit -- and you don’t even know what or _whose_ it is?”

“In my line of work, a locked box is an opportunity, pure and simple.” The floor rattled; Slade dropped them into a chute of cold air on the downside of a puffing steel mill, pursuers in tow. “In this case, it was a secret military base under the South China Sea, and a sealed high-security hangar that blocked all signals from the outside. No radar can find it, no electromagnetic imaging can map it -- no heat signature to give it away. A giant, invisible, submarine lockbox -- what self-defeating megalomaniac could resist a lure like that?”

“Whoa!” Dick broke eye contact with his phone. “Hold up! Manta has a secret base under the South China Sea? You broke into it? What did you _find?_”

He shrugged. “This ship and a couple stupid-looking tridents.”

“All that security for one whip?” Nightwing hummed. “I mean it’s a _nice_ one, but…” He trailed off. Then: “Hm.”

“What?” 

“Not sure exactly, but, I think I’m looking at -- a manual for some kind of _boom_ tube technology.”

“What? Let me see -- ”

“Ogle the squiggly lines later, old man -- it’s in ancient Atlantean!”

“Oh.”

“You don’t suppose... this is Ocean Master’s ship?”

Deathstroke let the question spiral into his unconscious while the rest of his brain focused on navigating. 

“Legend says ancient Atlanteans combined magic and technology to create the world’s first _spacecraft._” Nightwing went on. “They say Ocean Master channeled power through his trident… I know Black Manta took his place in the Light -- but what the hell ever happened to _him?_”

“I don’t know,” Slade admitted. “I really don’t care what happened to the frog prince.”

“Well you should. Atlantean culture is gaining extraterrestrial prominence faster than Earth itself, thanks to the colonies. The galactic exchange of skills and craftsmanship -- ”

“Here’s one dance routine I won’t be revisiting: _Slade in Space._”

Nightwing slapped his thighs and giggled. 

If Deathstroke had a spare hand, he would wave it. “I’m serious, kid. The water wizards can throw their arts and crafts and magic lightning bolts into the void all they want. Go ahead and colonize Earth. Colonize the Far-3 kiloparsec arm -- shit, colonize the Milky Way, for all I care. All that matters is there’s money to be made down here. Terrestrial society will always need a mercenary, a _back_bone for hire, to help deceive and subvert order. I have a _separate_ peace in mind; I’m looking out for number one. I’m looking for dead presidents, and a quiet place to bone. Is that so much to ask?”

Nightwing spoke to his phone, not in a particularly friendly tone. “If that’s really all you want, what are you doing with the Light?”

_This and that._ “Even I don’t know.”

“You want power. You let them fool you into wanting power.”

“What?”

“You’re not the backbone you’re the _body_shield, idiot -- ” He barked, and kept on barking. “Just because you refuse to look past the skies doesn’t mean _Vandal Savage_ hasn’t! You’re cannon fodder!”

They finally nailed his Delta fin. Smoke billowed in. 

Slade tried to pull out of his dive, but the keel was damaged and the most he could achieve was a slight tilt that sent them arcing over town, close enough to concrete to set off several car alarms -- and that’s when a blue diamond appeared in the sky, just ahead of them. The ship sank into it. A second or less ticked by like an eternity, and Slade felt his whole body curiously elongated, sluggish in space but hyper-aware of time passing crunching and folding around him -- 

Then, space seemed to huff and fling itself jealously outward. The ripple that carried them curled in on itself and collapsed, just after spitting out the smoking carcass of the ship. 

“Richard -- ”

Slade’s copilot grunted. He was ducked over his phone again, flicking light-speed through a flood of binary. If Atlanteans _had_ binary. Maybe instead of _cod_ing their ships they left it all to quarks and seahorse dreams. 

“It’s going to take a minute before we can boom tube again.”

“We can _boom_ tube?”

“Bitch -- ” Nightwing snapped. “What do you think!”

They were in a cave-like marine docking station, not _bustling_ or anything but ten or twelve guys in matching outfits started running around and shouting pretty much the moment Slade’s ship appeared out of thin air. 

“I think,” the mercenary bit back, eyeing the movement outside. “My mind has been transported back in time, and to planet of the fish-people. Because I’m shipwrecked with _you_, again, and about to die, _again._” 

“We were about to die in the city, too,” Nightwing pointed out. “It was all I could think to do to get us out of there.”

“Out of there to _where,_ exactly?”

“Now you’re getting picky. You told me to do _anything_.”

“_No_-o,” Slade spoke through bursts of hysterical, disbelieving laughter. “I never, fucking, _said_ that.”

“You said _any_thing I could do to save us, and that’s what I did. You may not have said so explicitly the _second_ time we were in mortal danger, but I applied the suggestion again anyway, not thinking you would have a problem with it.”

“You don't know where we are! You could’ve boomed us to the fucking moon! I had a better chance of surviving on familiar ground -- ”

“Your ass was on fire.”

“Now, we’re still in mortal danger, lost, _and_ dead in the water. Thanks a lot.”

“Your ass, was on, _fire._”

“Yes, because they took out my Delta fin!” Slade was free to wave his hand now. “Don’t you understand? They didn’t want to wreck the ship, just disable it -- we would’ve been fine if you hadn’t -- I have _one_ good hand and I can’t fight off Planet of the _Sea_ Monkeys right now!” 

Dick finally looked up from his phone and Slade recognized, with some alarm, a zero-tolerance crease between his brows reminiscent of the OG Bat’s -- 

“Okay you need to calm down right now,” Nightwing fired. “You’re a pathetic racist, number one. Number two, I’m not your sidekick. I’m not you’re minion. I saw an opportunity to save our asses and I took it -- if I left it up to you and your _right hand_ we’d be a fiery wreck on Main Street right now!”

“I don’t care why you did it, I want to know _where_ you did it _to_,” said Deathstroke, making an effort to stay level and easy, even though a bunch of fish-heads were leveling tridents at the ship. “Only asking so I can make a couple of quick underwater funeral arrangements.”

“Shut _up!_” Dick hissed, screen-bound again. “God. I don’t remember you being such a nervous _bas_tard.”

“I think you’re deflecting your emotions onto me,” said Slade. “I’m completely relaxed, I swear. I haven’t felt true fear since _The Second Barbra Streisand Album_. Oh, look -- the tridents are firing lasers at us, now.”

“Just keep us afloat for the next jump.”

“Keep us afloat?” The mercenary choked another deranged laugh. “This isn’t the magic _school_ bus, kid -- I left my Delta fin in Gotham! We’d have better luck sailing out of here on a raccoon’s nut-sack -- ”

“Hit the throttle!”

Slade hit the throttle.

The blue diamond, again. Space constrained to a decimal point between his eyes, time a tether on his toes. There was a brutal sensation of elongation somewhere in the middle, and then his ship unfolded from space a second time. 

“Richard…”

His copilot sighed. “What?”

“You don’t know what you’re doing, do you.”

Another sigh. “Not really.”

“Is this even Earth?”

“I hope so.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ohho _shit_ ^^


	10. pearl / jam

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ^^
> 
> pls enjoy

Nightwing bit down. Every single conscious part of him resisted reality. 

It would be impossible to boom tube again with the ship grounded. Both navigation panels reverted to static; the cut-off lever was in two pieces on the floor; even the dashboard alarms all dropped off into silence. Smoke leaked through the vents and gathered in a thickening veil under the windshield -- wouldn’t’ve mattered anyway; everything beyond the glass was pure, drop-curtain black. 

“Jesus,” he swore quietly. “Looks like the beginning of time out there.”

Out of the darkness, Deathstroke. “In Māori myth, the universe is born when the offspring of earth and sky rip their parents apart and mold the world from their blood.” 

“Please,” Nightwing murmured, after a moment. “Tell me this is the drug kicking in.”

A snort. “I wish. I _should_ have drugged you. At least then I’d have the evening to myself.”

“Romantic, Slade. But as usual, a front. We both know you didn’t link up with me to be alone tonight.”

“Didn’t do it so you could shove your fist any further up my asshole, either, Detective -- ” A grumble. “But let’s hear it. Tell me _why_ I would do this to myself.”

“I’m still kind of figuring that out.” Dick unbelted himself from the copilot’s chair and stood. Even in a state of blind panic, shock or debilitating dyspepsia, the Bat back-up drive at his core never failed; it was always lit, humming, tapping, playing his thoughts and actions like big-band jazz -- if you weren’t moving forward, you were absolutely moving backward. “Couple of funny options on the table, actually.”

Deathstroke paused in dragging a hand over his face. The red hood lamps swelled and subsided, heart-like; every power fluctuation arrived with a guttering sigh from the vents and the faint _tick! zzzzst-tock!_ of electric currents being blocked and redirected. Slade spoke like he’d been rustled from a daydream, and accidentally let someone else win at _Hungry Hungry Hippos_. The world had crashed down around his ears, and he didn’t even care enough to take notice anymore. “Funny?”

“Yes.” Nightwing took one half-moon step around the pilot’s roost and dropped to a crouch at his elbow. “My favorite so far is, you’re in love with me.”

Another snort. The headless stump of his left arm had blotted through its untidy wrappings, again. Dick wrinkled his nose. Funny how you learn to overprotect your blind spots, even at the cost of a dominant limb -- Slade Wilson took _self-defeat_ far too literally. 

“The second is, you came to kill me.” said Dick. “But you haven’t been trying very hard, which brings me to my _third_ funny option, and forerunner for the truth, more or less.”

A sigh. “Go on. What is it?”

“I think you came out of hiding tonight -- hoping I would kill _you_.”

The mercenary sat, silent. And Nightwing sat, too, playing his fingertips over the tangled riverbed veins of his caramel forearm -- decapitated now, but still sort of lovely with life and loam. Finally, he rose. 

“Are you coming?”

Intead of waiting for a response, he began to pick his way across the flight deck, over the narrow causeway and under the anterior arch. He paused near the ladder to the upper fuselage. 

If you didn’t know immediately when someone like Slade was behind you, then something was very wrong. And if you _did_ notice, then chances were something was a_bout_ to go very wrong. Like a cloud passing over the sun; you feel it, even tucked indoors and ninety million miles away. 

Nightwing confessed he also had a certain sensitivity for these things. 

His enemy’s aura lurked behind him and he basked in it. It was that delicious moment after you receive a gift but before you open it; the moment immediately before introducing the heel of your boot to the brains of an assailant -- Dick took a deep breath, ignored his instinct, and settled into the shadow of the valley of death. 

Deathstroke pushed his arm around his middle. “Before we both lose our minds and die of hypoxia, we should roll around some more. You know, without clothes.”

Desire manifested in his gut like terror. 

Even shipwrecked, lost, and completely out of luck, Dick maintained his stubborn back-up drives: survival protocols, the mindful arrangement of mission objectives, and just a little bit of room left over for the indulgences, humor, _joie de vivre_ \-- he played the role, but always with a certain boyish, teen-in-tights delight. For Robin, joking around was a coping mechanism, analgesic against the steady poison of vigilante life. After Wally, it felt more like a mask. A smile was always the best costume, he used to think. Until it became one of the things that drove him and the team apart. Just one. 

He flipped his eyes to the ceiling. Slade’s palm was growing heavy on his solar plexus. “I don’t think that will be necessary. Do you have a gas monitor?”

“Are you sure?” He ignored him. “I’ve got vaseline, somewhere. And plenty of engine grease.”

“Nothing petroleum-based up my butt, thanks. How many oxygen tanks have you got?”

“That’s no fun. Four. Well, three and a half. Only one rebreather.”

“We’re clearly above ground,” Nightwing considered. “Or, at least, not taking on water yet. I don’t think Ocean Master would save coordinates for a drop-point somewhere without a breathable atmosphere.”

“Sure, let’s go with that.”

Dick straightened and turned to face his old rival. A breeze rushed over his belly and his shirt fell back into place. “I wish you would take this seriously.”

“Fine. Let’s talk seriously." His pale eye narrowed. "I’ve crash-landed the prodigal Prince _Toad_sack's space-jumping _pump_kin on an ugly, dark as shit alien planet; Angelina Jolie from _Hackers_ is my copilot; I’ve been bleeding like a prize horse's ass for eighty-three hours straight -- oh, and I’m fucking starving. Trust me, kid. _I’m_ serious. You couldn’t find me more serious with a _cam_el-skinner under my nuts -- ”

“Which is why our _first_ priority,” Nightwing interrupted, already quite finished with the mercenary’s unsettling taste in imagery. “Should be to survey the territory, secure the means of survival, and focus on getting out of here. You’re acting like we’re already dead.”

“Maybe we are," he leered. "Maybe this is what death feels like.”

Dick rolled his eyes again. “Man, are you always this copeless when you’re hangry? Look, I know you think you’re in a _dry spell,_ or whatever, but you still want to live; you still want to live to fuck and lie and make money another day, don’t you? If you can get the ship up and running, I can still access the mainframe from my phone. I’ll translate these arrays properly -- and we’ll jump out of here. Alright?”

He reached out and settled one hand around the back of Slade's neck. “And stop referencing pop culture," he added. "It’s freaking me out.”

“That’s not fair,” the mercenary, indignant. “_You_ do it all the time. I’ve been living on the same planet as you, haven’t I? Up until now, anyway.”

Nightwing laughed lightly. “Aren't you forgetting about _Uberwald?_ We’ve lived thousands of lives! Think of this like another three seconds of hyperbolic time distortion. What was it you said? Fuck everyone else, we’re getting out of this Hell alive.” 

One of the things Dick liked and appreciated about Slade but would deny if asked directly: he was always down to make out. Not one of those surly don’t-touch-my-face men who couldn’t handle being queer; when Deathstroke wanted something, he took every single part of it. Unlike some breeds of halftime show evil-doer who held up luxury outlets and jewelry stores for diamond-face watches or expensive necklaces -- Slade bypassed the stores, the retail, even the corporate warehouses; he would find the river where diamonds were born and swallow it. 

Nightwing leaned up on his toes, pushed his hand down the collar of the mercenary’s vest and raked it back over the clammy skin between his shoulder blades. Slade growled an ambient moan, extracted his tongue from his mouth and snapped his teeth twice over Dick's bottom lip.

“What’re you thinking about?” He roughed.

Dick jerked away to avoid losing blood. “_Dia_monds.”

“A-ha,” Slade hummed, and it felt dark and cold as the deep ocean. “I see you in pearl. It takes a host to make a pearl. Not every oyster does it. And even then, the size and shape depend on how many irritants get under its shell, and if the oyster has the right juice to fight them off. The more it struggles, the more beautiful the pearl. We sell up the white ones but like all things they come in color. Blue, red, green. Even black, and gray. Tiny souls jacked from living bodies.”

“That’s so… jarring.”

Deathstroke bared his teeth in an awful parody smile and Dick tightened his grip over the scruff of his neck, troubled by the twisted fondness he felt for the villain. He resisted the temptation to kiss him again -- better not risk any untoward _feel_ings bleeding over. One of them was always bleeding, somehow or another, he thought.

“Do you have a signal gun? Or some landing flares?” Nightwing pushed around him and bounded up the ladder to the fuselage. “I thought I saw some, before -- ”

By the miracle of patience and experience -- namely the regular oversight and maintenance of a dozen or so emotionally compromised super-teens -- he managed to coax his bitter enemy into a rebreather mask and out the cargo bay hatch armed with a breech-loaded signal gun and a multi-star cartridge. 

Dick settled back in the pilot’s chair to watch.

Slade was probably still in a sulk over his left hand. That's all.

Dick knew “super” folks, even the artificially enhanced ones, tended to take losses and serious bodily injury pretty hard. Something about super psychology made them think it was shameful to fall, even once.

_Pop!_ Six red flares arced far over the ship’s berth; the wash of artificial light revealed a chessboard arrangement of strange, rockish shapes on the ground, rows and rows of them leading down a shallow slope into a fathomless dark coin like a body of fluid -- water, he thought, but made no guesses. Other than that and a few obvious dents and dimples, he saw nothingness stretching into the distance on all sides. Even the sky, like an upturned bowl of black. 

One by one the six stars peaked, paused, and fell in long glowing tails, most of them destined for that dark coin. Nightwing tracked their progress closely but never saw anything hit the surface; as soon as the first flare neared it, the fluid erupted in thick swathes of vapor -- hued pink in the rosy chlorine light. As more and more flares made the same dive, the reaction grew on itself and petals of a vast fog unfolded over the area. A hundred kilometers wide, he estimated, and blooming rapidly; it was like watching a time-lapse video of cotton flowering in the dark. Dick suppressed a sudden fear of being smothered.

The last two flares from the six-star cartridge flew wide and landed on solid ground closer to the ship, where they burned for some time. Nightwing leaned forward in his seat. _Khunk!_ The distant sound of the hatch slamming shut.

“That was kind of fun.” Deathstroke fell into the copilot’s chair smelling of heat and exosphere. “It’s hot as shit out there.”

“Do those look like stromatolites to you?”

“Tomato-what? What are they selling?”

Nightwing sighed through his nose. Shipwrecked stranded with the dark side’s least motivated team player. “Those rock formations _might_ be the remains of photosynthetic microbial life.”

“Can we eat it?”

“They’re _fos_sils!” He snapped. “But it could be evidence of an oxygen-rich past.”

Deathstroke spread his hand and his hand-stump. “How does that help us now?”

“Nature tends to move in cycles; the ecology here could be key to understanding why Ocean Master saved these coordinates in his ship’s log -- ”

“Who cares? Just decode the coordinates back to our _own_ dark and scary waterworld. I’ll fix the ship when I can see what the fuck i’m doing. Presumably there is a sun assigned to this planet.”

“Look at all that boil-off,” Nightwing chewed his thumbnail, watching the steam continue to unfold outside. “Low atmospheric pressure, maybe?”

“Maybe the _whis_per of an atmosphere,” Deathstroke confirmed. “Oxygen saturation out there is definitely not 20%. Air’s thin as the Himalayas. One way or another -- I will have to kill you to survive.”

“A fight would consume so much oxygen,” Dick flipped a hand. “Better if we wait it out. Besides, you need me to translate.”

“I need you, for now.”

“I want a look inside that lake.” He decided it was a lake until further notice. “How many calcium flares do you have?”

“Counting the one I’m holding in my left hand? Zero.”

Nightwing doubted very much if even the camel skinner would kill his sarcasm. “You commandeered a _sub_marine aircraft with no calcium flares at all?”

“I guess Ocean Master didn’t care much for illuminating the briny depths.” Slade leaned. He bandied one knee, then pretended to take pity on him -- “The air tasted sweet.”

“Sweet?”

“Like one of those Ginger Spice nougat candies from the 90s,” said the mercenary. “Regular old nougat, but there was something special about looking at a hot chick on the wrapper while you ate it. That was the first time advertising truly tapped into my loins.”

Nightwing scanned his story for any relevant information. “...The Spice Girls had a line of _nougat_?”

“And only ten different kinds of chocolate bar!” He scoffed. “You’ve been under the Bat’s armpit too long -- life in the Cave sounds like internment camp.”

“Complete with Stockholm.”

Slade barked one of his quick _A-ha!_ gusts of laughter and stuck one heel to the KO’d dashboard. “Daddy issues -- never met a sidekick without ‘em.”

“You love it,” Nightwing responded per the old social formula, distracted by the last two flares still simmering outside the windshield. He crossed his arms over his chest, focusing again on the crooked shapes leading down to the shoreline. He decided he would need a sample. 

“Where are you going?”

Dick didn’t bother with the Dragonfly unit -- he didn’t know how the atmosphere would react with the propulsion system, and it was a weight on his back that he couldn’t accommodate together with an oxygen tank. Before the cargo bay doors sealed behind him, Deathstroke slipped inside. 

“This is stupid.” He informed him.

“I’m taking the rebreather,” said Dick. “Don’t come with me.”

“You don’t know what’s out there. _I’ll_ survive, but you probably won’t. And then what am I supposed to do? Harvest the cell phone from your corpse and teach myself _Ancient Atlantean?_”

“Yes. Don’t come with me." He said again. "You’re leaking oxygen from that wound. If you fall over out there, I’m leaving you.”

“Very heroic. But who’s going to fix the ship then?” Slade challenged. 

Nightwing chuckled. “I allotted you that task to soothe your ego and trick you into a team mentality. If you collapse out there I’ll fix the ship myself, with my gigantic brain, and my daddy issues. _Stay_,” he pushed on the front of his vest. “I’ll be right back. I want a sample from that lake. I think -- Slade?”

The mercenary leaned, but this time he didn’t _stop_ leaning, and Dick had to hold him at bay with two hands, swearing in surprise. He felt the tickle of teeth on his earlobe -- a hand pushed clumsily under his shirt. “Dude!” He protested. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Hn?” A murmur. 

Nightwing tried his name again, and shoved the villain back against the cargo bay doors, steadying him there with his forearm stapled over his chest. Deathstroke sighed wearily. “What are you doing.”

“What are _you_ doing!”

He shrugged his shoulders, then left them slumped. “I want to have sex.”

“Right _now?_”

“Yes?” Innocently: “It’s time for my casual evening lay.”

Dick shook his head, perturbed. “What did you say the air tasted like?”

The mercenary hummed, long and low. “Sweet? Organic, like… something dead a long time… ”

“Deathstroke,” he interrupted. “I think there’s something wrong with you.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“No,” Dick pressed the palm of his free hand to his cheek and peered into Slade’s eye; he registered his pupil, swollen like a black moon. “You look _dosed_.”

“I’m fine,” Slade waved him off. “I just need to, sit down for a second.”

And then he blacked out against the cargo bay doors. 

Dick bit down on his disbelief. It had been his night off. It had been his fucking _night off_.


	11. breaking glass (no man's land)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> abolutely slammin tunes for this chapter.

_Lines crossed._ Don’t get your lines crossed, Barbara was always telling him.

It was only a few phone calls. Dick saw his dental hygienist in Blüdhaven more regularly than Slade. Sure, Deathstroke the Terminator was incrementally more dangerous than a bleeding line of minty floss, but his reward for taking the risk was a look at the dark side of the _moon_, compared to the sad attempts of Justice League secret intelligence. Nightwing didn’t have his lines crossed -- he knew his objectives; he was just operating at a higher _frequency_ than the capes upstairs. 

Dick couldn’t help being smart and crafty. It was a Bat thing. 

Barbara had a response for this, she always did. You don’t have to break the glass to see through to the other side, she would say. 

There was good, there was evil -- and occasionally, a self-righteous anti-hero pretending to muddle somewhere in-between -- but in the end you were either a fundamentally decent human being or you weren’t. Cut and dry. Civilization built up its tower over that raw understanding of justice. Confirmation of the existence of good and evil satisfies a very base desire to assign order in a chaotic world; it was the reason super heroes were compelled into existence in the first place -- Dick knew the lore, and he kept the faith. The Justice League was _good_. The League was _necessary_. Even if he had some ideas about how they ran things, it wouldn't be his place to question them.

You know what they say. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Certainly don’t _try_ and break it. 

Dick saw very clearly the distinction between good and evil. He just wasn’t so sure about right and wrong, anymore.

Growing up in Gotham, you doubt the law as much as the press. Media coverage of the mayor’s city "beautification" project had rained psychological _blitzkrieg_ on anyone with a television. Every major news broadcast showed parks and gardens stuffed with onlookers, everyone somber and curiously well-dressed, salaried citizens representing the New Gotham, and its shopping malls, hedgerows, luxury golf courses. Dick saw the other side. Tailored into a private school uniform on his walk to the Academy, the detective could not shut his eyes to messages left on powerlines, ribbons in the sky for bystanders shot in the streets, blue bullets tucked between the shoulder blades of young Gothamites and swept under public notice as “self-defense”. He saw abandoned bills for lost children tacked one over the other, crushed Parliaments and old hypodermic needles stuck in fresh-turned flower beds. A couple of ravens rendezvous over a hunk of roadkill, watching passers-by with one eye each -- a lidless, fowl stare. Black-veiled preachers for the disorderly human Mass. 

Nightwing trudged up the slope of a glossy alien embankment, missing home. _Zsssst!_ His last pop of oxygen. 

He even missed Uberwald, in a weird way. Partly for its rigid code and ineffable judging system, and partly for the avatars. Dick hadn't particularly liked being reduced to an approximation of his 13-year-old self in green tights (and that giant, _fucking_, yellow _R_) but besides the obviously outdated intelligence behind the meta imaging, he thoroughly enjoyed his release from the constraints of physical form. He was old enough now to realize that inhabiting a body _sucked_ \-- existence was pain, suffering, and neurochemical emotional turmoil on a _nor_mal day.

In the game world, participants were rendered noncorporeal shades of themselves; he became a bundle of coded specs and quarantined consciousness spacecast through time for round after round of epic lethal combat. Had he aged in there? Dick wondered. His body was the same as he’d left it, but things had changed, somehow. The laws and preconceptions which had guided him before seemed less real. Slade was the only one who really understood the feeling. 

Post-traumatic something-or-other couldn’t explain it away. Dick didn’t need a psychiatrist -- he needed everyone else to get on his level. 

The Atlantean ship’s port side airlock sealed with a pop, hiss, and an echoing _khunk!_

Nightwing ditched the mask and cowl, ripped out the rebreather tube, and leaned back against the doors, taking small breaths of mixed alien atmosphere and lingering life support. His joints felt creaky weak, his jaw ached. The swamp grease of a heavy, humid air sat on his skin. He bled from a few cuts and scrapes. Nothing serious. 

The ship’s arteries glowed thick, oozy red, from engine to cockpit. Dick rebooted the mainframe computer and disengaged red alert status, but couldn’t eighty-six the bloody mood lighting.

In the cramped anterior junction at the heart of the little ship, breathing was easier. Things started to look more up-down and less watery. Dick shifted out of the rest of his gear in his own well-honed, dog-tired routine. He carefully stored the rebreather with his outer armor, couplets and vest, and pulled the strap of Deathstroke’s Hiroshima-style speargun back across his chest before ascending the ladder to the upper fuselage with a mug of tea and a medical kit under his arm. Together with everything else on his mind, all he needed to complete the juggling act was a couple of spinning plates and a silly hat. 

Dick left his tea in the window alcove and disarmed the speargun before setting it aside.

Slade had a lot of toys. All of them just a little on the unusual side. The speargun was excellent craftsmanship: sleek black carbon fiber with titanium fittings, a very pronounced band elevator and an odd, split-leaf blade. Over the last couple of hours, Dick had grown a shy affinity for it. 

He chose a weapon with rollerback function so that, if the circumstances arose, and he absolutely _had_ to shoot some alien locals out of the gut-black wilds, he could reel it in for a sample. And if he shot something by accident out of curiosity, well, he'd blame it on the borrowed trigger. Nightwing was going to break League protocol anyway; he might as well cover his ass in the paperwork.

Speaking of shy affinities. 

Slade grumbled something incoherent. Then: “Using my, supermag.” 

“Yes, it’s a splendid little killing machine.” He hefted the speargun again, admiring its weight and balance in his hands, the double-handed grips -- he almost wanted one of his own. “What’s the Japanese on the insignia say?”

Slade's pale eye flicked briefly over the pictographs. “_Bad fish._”

Nightwing chuckled, feeling annoyed -- helpless, and more than a little bit bitter. He set the weapon aside and sat cross-legged beside the mercenary.

“It’s been six hours since we landed. I think.”

“You think?”

“I managed to get the ship’s computer up and running, but the external sensors are reading nonsense. Long-distance communications are down. Anything satellite-based is out of the question, and even if one of us _had_ an old-school timepiece, we couldn’t trust the physics on the moving gears. And this planet must be rotating in high-speed _retro_grade, or something, because I get instant vertigo outside and start walking in crooked lines.”

“Calm down.” Deathstroke narrowed his eye very hard on his stump as Nightwing began to undress it. “You went outside?”

“I’m not staying on this ship forever!” Dick snapped. “I told you, I wanted samples from that lake -- ”

“And?” said Slade, sounding angry. He didn’t have any reason to be angry. _He_ was the one who blacked out and layed around sucking up precious oxygen for six hours --

“_And_ they’re in the centrifuge right now.” said Dick. “Don’t harass me. We both work alone and this is painful enough as is.” He paused, took a long, sparing breath. “But, I am sorry about this.”

“About what.” 

Dick shrugged one shoulder. “Making you go out tonight. Falling through that stupid wormhole. Um, the symbolic castration of your left arm.”

“I told you. I’m in a dry period.” Slade let his eye close. “And as for ruining my night -- I’m the one who pulled up on you, remember?”

Nightwing eyed the villain critically, tying off the fresh wrappings without a word. He decided to do him the favor of _not_ mentioning how fucking terrible he looked, submerged in red light, sweating and shaking and at the same time making a jealous effort to look like he _was_n’t sweating or shaking. Dick didn’t get any satisfaction out of seeing his enemy brought so low. He was almost disappointed.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Slade spat, his pale eye waxing full like it did when he was truly pissed off. “Regenerating _blows_. I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

“Mm,” Dick hummed. He touched the invisible hand, imagined it curled into a tight fist, and coaxed the phantom fingers open with his own. It was probably the only hand of Deathstroke’s he’d ever be permitted to hold. “It'll take months, at this rate. Remember how I said I wouldn’t be nursing you?”

“Why don’t you just kill me?”

Dick sighed. He wasn’t in the mood for stupid questions, either. “I redirected auxiliary power to life support and sealed off the cargo bay to limit oxygen dispersal. We’ll last another 18 hours like this, until the engines are back online. I tried to trigger some power relays in the engine room, but, um -- ” He slid the pad of his thumb into the dearth of Slade's elbow, and found a feverish pulse. “I’m not too familiar with the routing mechanism for the fuel nacelles on a standard four-wide. I can feel the ship kicking, but it’s got nothing to ignite -- ”

Slade started to laugh, an awful sound that grew deeper, darker and nastier until it filled the narrow fuselage. Nightwing’s forgotten teen complexes reared their heads and he shivered. 

“You _need_ me,” the mercenary snarled. “You can’t kill me because you need me.”

Dick rolled his eyes and let the villain laugh. “For now.” He thought about the centrifuge. He wondered if he’d used the right chemical catalyst, if the sample was large enough, if it was even _worth_ getting knocked on his ass and almost drowned in that bizarre current of liquid air -- not to mention that nameless force dragging him down, down, deeper into the fluid heat of the lake -- 

“What happened to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“What happened to me?”

“I don’t know, exactly.”

“But you have theories.” said Slade. “Let’s hear them.” 

Red silk shadows pooled over dark honey skin. He’d unbuckled his vest but failed to remove it. Ditto the pants. It was so unusual to see Deathstroke laying prone. Dick imagined it many times, in both heroic and decidedly _un_heroic scenarios, but the fantasies couldn’t compare to delicious reality: Slade, on his back, _vul_nerable. 

“You can’t move.” His first theory. Dick scooted closer. He pulled his head into his lap. 

_Tch!_ Slade snorted. “You’re on the juice.” But he didn’t try to prove him wrong, and in a low voice, he added: “Fuck all this shit.”

Nightwing smiled, traced the outer rim of his ear, hurried to soothe the hate from his brow -- “Your in-between missions don’t make it on television because of your mouth.” He suggested.

“What’s wrong with my mouth?”

Dick adjusted his hips and dipped his head down -- he wanted to try the Black Spider thing. "Nothing," he answered. Slade seethed something about being jostled. Nightwing tracked his tongue along his lower lip, then stole his breath for a long minute.

“You went outside,” Slade grumbled. “You’ve been ex_posed_ \-- ”

Nightwing sat up again. He scratched lightly under the mercenary’s jaw, thinking. 

“Maybe.” He shrugged. “I wore your mask, I thought the fancy filters might help. I brought supplemental oxygen along, too, but it was difficult to gauge how much to take. Even if I have been affected, I shouldn’t react as badly as you, and a second data point only helps to confirm my theory -- ”

“It’s in the air.”

“It’s in the water,” Dick corrected. “You only got a small dose from the moisture in the air, but in your state, already bleeding and bitching -- it was enough. The pressure outside is so low, the atmosphere is in constant fluctuation between a liquid and gaseous state.” Nightwing didn’t mention getting dragged through the mud on invisible shackles, or launching a harpoon 50 feet into solid ground to save himself a horrible subaquatic death. “Couldn’t identify any wildlife out there,” he said instead. “Just the fossils on the shoreline, some detritus and embryonic activity in the lake. I think this planet only has lower forms of life. Microbes and algae with a mayfly-like breeding season -- ”

“How do you know?”

“I can’t be sure without the results from the centrifuge, but, I noticed signs of phosphorus in the soil and the lake body. _Huge_ amounts of phosphorus. Quantities you only find around a lot of decay, death and decomposition -- ”

“We landed in a graveyard.”

“Kind of -- it’s more like an ecosystem in the graveyard _phase_. Like I said, nature moves in circles. I think we’re looking at a eutrophic environment just starting to stir under the ashes of a dead past. The water is an H2O isotope with alien characteristics -- extraterrestrial guest molecules left over from the decay of organic lifeforms. The only thing is, the decomposition process normally _consumes_ oxygen.”

“So?”

“So the only way for such massive quantities of phosphorus to exist is as the byproduct of an _oligotrophic_ environment -- very high quantities of oxygen and very little organic matter. I think it’s a quick circle: during the periods of decay, phosphate levels drive up oxygen consumption, triggering the release of more phosphorus and ultimately reviving the photosynthetic microbial populations that depend on it; the microbes go into a breeding frenzy, driving up oxygen levels again -- nutrients go from overstock into shortage, and the population dies en masse. Everything feeds back into another loop.”

“This theory is pretty dark.”

“The environment is almost too unstable to thrive.” Nightwing concluded. “As for the aphrodisiac effects of the water-stuff, I don’t know how to explain that yet. My guess is it’s a side-effect of extraterrestrial compounds left behind after the last reproduction cycle -- ”

“One moment, please.” Dick stopped short. Slade heaved an apathetic sigh. “Does the Justice League categorize me under Genius level persons of interest, or just Enhanced and extra slippery?”

“You’re cross-referenced under both, sometimes. It depends who compiled the list. Batman has you under Genius level in the Gotham repository. Why?”

“Ok, good.” Deathstroke's shoulders loosened. He tipped his head to hide his blind side. Dick brushed the peaks of his knuckles over his snowy temple. “I just wanted to make sure, before I tell you I have no clue what you’re talking about. Now, if you need a biomechanical weapon repaired, or an assassination planned, let me know.”

“Maybe Batman was impressed with your knowledge of the Spice Girls. Back to the planetary analysis, now, if you don’t mind.”

He groaned. “No wonder your friends keep you in a cave. You’re boring as shit to talk to.”

“We’re in the middle of a crisis!” Dick snapped again. “This is life or death! Can I have your intellect for one _min_ute?”

“Yes. Stop being so afraid,” Slade advised. “Life isn’t that precious.”

“Maybe by _your_ reckoning -- ”

“No, by your own analysis. You said it yourself: this planet kills off its entire population; their dead bodies nourish the next generation, and it’s all part of the natural order. What makes it any different from Earth? Or _Gotham?_”

“You’re wrong.” Nightwing murmured. “You’re only looking at the surface. Nature hides. The true nature of things is always hidden.”

“Seems pretty straightforward to me. You’re born, you struggle, and sooner or later you go splat. And if you’re one of the lucky bugs, you do as God intended and get your rocks off somewhere in between.”

Dick sighed briefly. He reached for his tea. “You’re something really special, Deathstroke.”

“_Don’t_ spill that on me.”

“You know Dragon’s Breath Cave, in Africa?" said Dick. "It’s part of a network under the Kalahari desert, named for the jets of humid air rising from its belly -- because somewhere deep in those rocks, is the largest underground lake in the world. We still don’t even know how deep it is.”

“Excellent,” Slade mocked. “Another quiet vacation spot for white people. Maybe a Canadian entrepreneur will buy it, bottle it, and sell it back to the natives for three -- no, four dollars a pop.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“Sorry. Go on.” He didn’t sound sorry.

“Think about it, dude -- a massive reservoir of fresh water, hidden underneath one of the thirstiest regions in the world! Life wastes away on the surface while a handful of blind shrimp eke out an existence eating dirt in Dragon’s Breath Cave.”

“Reality is not above tear-jerking dramatic irony. I still don’t see your point.”

“Well, first: Ocean Master brought us here for a reason.” Nightwing decided. “And second -- everybody has a reservoir, man, even if they don’t know it. We’re all deserts, committed to fighting tooth and nail over pipe dreams like the ‘_natural_ order’ while our right to live is sequestered into lost oases, just out of reach. Don’t you get it? As above, so below -- the universe emerges as we observe it; even deep space, dead stars, and dark matter are part of our own internal landscape. Desolation is a state of being, not a physical place -- ”

“The Tuari word for desert,” Slade murmured. “Means _abandoned by God_.”

An alarm rattled on his hip. Dick jolted, pulled his phone from his pocket and paused to reshuffle the information he kept handy in the forefront of his mind. In a split second Nightwing slammed back to reality and the present grind -- or maybe, _out_ of reality. Out of the present moment, back to worrying about the material future, and whether or not he would still be breathing in 18 hours. “That’s the centrifuge.” He said, already slipping away, down the ladder, into the belly of the ship.

Vertigo struck him several minutes later, and Dick wondered again what system they were in, what quadrant of the Multiverse, and what was the angular velocity on this quasi-aquatic crapshoot. He didn’t even have any stars to take measurements from. Nothing reflected visible light in the sky at all.

Nightwing steadily formed another theory. 

He ascended the ladder to the fuselage for a second time one-handed, scanning and rescanning the data on his phone, grinding his teeth around a flipping bowling alley of a bad headache. 

“Stop crawling up here. It’s impossible to heal with another heartbeat around.”

Dick settled behind him again. Bitching and bleeding, as usual.

“You’re wasting air going up and down all the time. Just stay in one place until you know what you’re doing next.”

“Fine,” said Dick. “I’ll stay here, but just for a little while.”

“That’s not what I -- ”

“Look,” he interrupted. “Take a look at this.”

“I see it, don’t _wag_ it in front of me, for fuck’s sake. What am I looking at?”

“A karyotype of the dead particulate matter I took from that lake. I was right, it’s a lower life form, but, not quite a microbe, probably feeds on sediment and by-product from the decay, but it isn’t photosynthetic, either, so it doesn’t explain the high O2 concentrations; there’s _400%_ more dissolved oxygen gas in this lake than normal water on Earth, yet somehow it stays in this, semi-liquid form. And another thing -- ” Dick rotated his phone screen. The catalog of sliced chromatid fibers expanded. “Does this genetic structure look sort of, Atlantean, to you?”

For once Deathstroke was quiet. With some effort he drew himself up on one elbow, and frowned at the data a long time.

“You don’t suppose,” he said, at last. “We've landed in Ocean Master's secret jack-off pond?”

Dick fumbled his phone and snatched it up again with a disappointed scowl. “Slade. Come on, dog.”

“I’m serious. This _lake_ you’re obsessed with has all the properties of an amniotic sack -- how much do you want to bet he’s trying to breed another army of dick-riding clones to help retake Finland?”

"You mean Atlantis." Dick stared at the phone screen, dropped his chin over Slade’s shoulder and closed his eyes. “It’s possible. I guess.”

“I was right.” he jeered. “What was all that Alchemist _bull_-shit you just said about hidden meaning and deeper truths -- here’s your deeper truth: Ocean Master comes here to get horny and spray his seed around. You’re looking at a subterranean pleasure planet.”

“That’s, disgusting,” Nightwing hummed. “There’s gotta be more to it. Something we’re missing. Why this place? Is there something about the water? Are the conditions right for some kind of gene splicing experiment, maybe? And where is all that oxygen coming from if not from photosynthesis?”

“The little merman's royal sperm pond, huh.” Deathstroke ignored him, still shaking with copeless laughter. “I hope you didn’t drink any of that fertile fucking water. This whole planet is an _m_-preg scenario waiting to happen.”

Dick choked on the dregs of his tea and hastily put his mug aside. 

“Don’t worry,” drawled the villain. “I’m not interested in having any more offspring.”

“Deathstroke,” Batman’s protege warned, very quiet. “What did I tell you, about pop culture references?”

“Something I completely disregarded, probably.”

“You’re a sick, twisted, old man.” He decided. “And I would sooner carry Ocean Master’s slimy man-litter than yours.”

“Who said anything about _you_ carrying _my_ litter?”

Dick stared at the grinning skinshape of pure evil before him. A dimple taunted him from one cinnamon cheek. “You’re not cute,” he hummed. “You’re a gigantic, manipulative liar.”

“I know.” Slade snorted. “I’m all your worst qualities, aren’t I? The paranoid egomaniac at the heart of Dick Grayson -- that’s probably what made me your arch-_nem_esis for a little while. I’m not real, am I? I’m nothing but a shitty metaphor, a blip in your early character development.”

“Aren’t most people the main characters of their own lives?”

“Live as long as me, little bat, and you learn to get cozy with the sidelines.”

Dick put his phone away. “Slade, there’s, something else.” He pushed out a leg. The mercenary eclipsed his knee in one hand. “A few hours ago, I took an oxygen tank, picked a direction, and started walking. A hundred meters off the port side, I hit a wall.”

“A wall? What sort of wall?”

“I’m not sure. It seemed smooth, but not built. I sent a drone up to scout and it powered down in the upper atmosphere without finding the top. I sent two more down each side and followed it on foot another 10 kilometers. No breaks or alterations in the structure, no stairs or doors. I think -- I think we might be surrounded.”

“Terrific.” Slade grunted. “Your hands are freezing.”

“One more thing." Dick curled his fingers and tucked them in the small heat of his back. "The further I got from the lake, the harder it pulled.”

“What? Pulling where -- pulling you _in?_”

“Almost,” said the detective. “Or, like, away. I felt like it wanted me away from those walls, and back in the soup. Slade -- I know you’re tired and you need to heal, but… I have this feeling like, we should get out of here as soon as possible.”

“I'll repair the engines.”

“Can you stand?”

“Soon.”

“What if... what if I can’t get the boom tube tech functioning again?”

“Then we find another way out of here.”

Dick dropped his forehead over his shoulder and allowed his fears to follow. “I don’t see any good ways out of this.”

“It’s like I always say.” The mercenary, darkly. “If you can’t circle a wall, and you can’t climb over it -- knock it the fuck down.”

“I think that’s a terrible plan, but alright.” Nightwing tried a weak laugh. He nipped at the mercenary's throat and sucked a coin-sized mark into his skin. “I miss Uberwald,” he confessed, watching the small bruise fade and disappear. 

“_Real_ly?”

“Sometimes. Everything was so predictable. My birdarangs never malfunctioned. My throws missed exactly three-per-cent of the time.”

“Sure,” he intoned, rudely. “And besides the constant, niggling threat of being hunted down and gutted violently by any one of the other terrified, bloodthirsty contestants, the scenery was very nice.”

“Dying in combat is honorable, at least.” said Dick. “Dying in Ocean Master’s creepy egg pond would be utterly meaningless.”

“Here we go.” Slade scoffed. “The Justice League _glory_ hounding. Imagine living through ten times the bullshit and getting hardly half the credit, like me.”

“You get your_self_ into the bullshit! I didn’t even want you in Uberwald with me,” Nightwing admitted. “I only tried to hook you in after so you wouldn’t sell the location of the telluric crossing. You never would’ve been involved if you just minded your own business. _Why_ do you always have to be stalking me at the worst possible times?”

“I wasn’t stalking you. It was pure coincidence, that time.”

“A coincidence, really?" He barked a laugh. "You mean you parked your shit on the Iranduba floodplain during a record-breaking geomagnetic particle storm by _ac_cident? What were you doing out there -- pleasure rafting?”

“I have a platinum membership at the nearby strip club, actually.”

“You’re not even trying.”

“On the contrary. Platinum memberships don’t just form overnight, Dick. Ask around -- there’s a long list of left-behind shore leave whores begging to differ.”

“Right. Because the super-juice froze you at your physical peak, which apparently means you can’t go two days without getting off in a stranger -- ” 

“It’s not that I _can’t_,” said Slade, resigned. “I just, don’t particularly want to.”

“Screw you.” Dick narrowed his eyes, unseen. “_You_’re the fucking glory hound. I wish you’d satisfied your obsession with a different sidekick. I wouldn't've been mixed up in your stupid games, and I never would’ve started to kind of admire you for them. I wish -- I wish I never moved to Jump.”

“You don’t mean any of that.” The mercenary, coldly. “You got your first team in Jump City. You finally got a chance to lead, to rough out an identity for yourself, and show the League what’s next -- ”

“And you seeped into my dream like a plague. Made me doubt myself, my team, my ideals.”

“Stop this. We were just getting along.”

“The worst part was,” Dick murmured, thoroughly in the past. “A part of me always wanted what you offered -- that’s why it made me so angry. Even when you contaminated my friends with remote nanites and threatened to kill them one by one, I wanted you. I wanted to see where ‘yes’ could take me, but there wasn’t any _right_ or _good_ way to walk that path with you. And I waited a long time, I waited _years_, to see if that feeling would go away.”

“Did it?” said Slade, very still.

“I convinced myself that yeah, it had.” Dick sighed, a short gust of frustration. “I kept tabs on you but not _personal_ ones, at least, I didn’t think so. Distance is the cure for puppy love, you know.”

“Puppy -- ?”

“Then Uberwald came around, and _that_ whole idea went out the window -- I remembered what it was like actually working with you.”

“Oh.”

“You can’t put distance on that kind of chemistry. I mean, willingly or not, we can and _have_ accomplished some pretty incredible shit together, right?”

“No question,” Deathstroke nodded, and waited. Then: “And?”

Nightwing shrugged back to the present, pushed his nose under the corner of his jaw. The mercenary jumped like he wasn’t expecting contact. Dick giggled. “And what?”

“Nothing.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing.” Slade's good hand twitched. “I thought you were going to say something else.”

“Something like what?” He nosed around, sank his teeth into the soft lobe of his ear. 

Suddenly the ship rocked. The sound of metal crying and groaning rent the air of the silent planet -- _Sck-reeeeeee!_ The red systems alert started up again, and alarms blared in the cockpit. 

Nightwing sprang to his feet at the first sign of movement. “The fuck!”

“The ship is moving.” Slade muttered, braced against the wall panel, but standing. “How is the ship moving?”

“That’s impossible -- ” Dick scoffed, on the way to the glass to prove him wrong, but in the hazy glow of the starboard side fog-lighting, he saw that it was true -- the ship was slowly eating up the ground beneath it, thumping and bumping along sideways, toward the lake. It looked awkward and unnatural, like a can on a string, almost, like it was being pulled. 

“We’re being reeled in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ty for reading~
> 
> ur slade drawing is pretty good fool but the eye is on the wrong side  
pls forgive me i didn't notice until it was too late XD
> 
> <3


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